Rusty Lake Hotel 2016: Full Of Suspense And Atmosphere.

The developers of the Rusty Lake & Cube Escape series, a room-style puzzle game with a bizarre premise and a lovely design, have released Rusty Lake Hotel, a cryptic point-and-click adventure. Are you prepared to serve the Rusty Lake Hotel’s guests? In this dark and creepy puzzle game, you must solve all secrets.

In the gaming sector, the macabre has paradoxically been beaten to death, with blood and viscera becoming more common home decor than wallpaper. That’s why it’s so refreshing when a game, like a clever murder mystery, takes a more cerebral approach to murder. However, if you come to Rusty Lake Hotel looking for it, you’ll receive little more than the impression of refinement. There are signs of something great here, but a shallow plot, clunky puzzles, and a real boar confuse it.

Mr. Owl, the proprietor of the Rusty Lake Hotel, is introduced to you as he leads a raft of five visitors across the calm waters to their rooms. Each of the animal-faced guests has their motive for attending Mr. Owl’s gathering, and it is your responsibility to look after their needs while they are here. Every evening, the visitors will eat supper, and you will then accompany one of them to their room to assist them in some way. Of course, there is an ulterior reason for your service, and as you develop, more and more vacancies at the hotel will become available.

The major plot, which you will hear about approximately five minutes into the game, Spoiler alert: The hotel does not have any main dishes to feed its customers, who happen to be exquisite meats. You can forget about whatever mystery or intrigue you had in mind because what you’re truly doing here is murdering guests to feed other visitors. The majority of the Rusty Lake Hotel game takes place in the visitors’ five rooms, where you must solve a complicated series of puzzles and mental teasers to orchestrate a fatal encounter with the inhabitant and harvest their meat. You serve it to whoever is left the next day and then move on to the next poor animal.

The puzzles are the meat (heh) of the game, and this is where most players will get stuck. Each room of the Rusty Lake Hotel game has four walls with shelves, pictures, tables, and other decorations that can be clicked on and utilized to kill someone. Locked cabinets with concealed keys, letter and number substitution puzzles, classics such as unlabeled weights and measuring water out, and using weird items on strange stuff are all on the menu. The other half of the puzzles are the killer, forcing you to click on sprouts until they randomly blossom into keys, or click on toy monkeys in a precise order, gaze out a window at the right time, or give a boar sandwich to the boar who it out. And believe us when we say we can’t make that last one up.

Between the fecal snack, the bleeding toilet, and the dull, confusing puzzle-locked cabinets, Mr. Boar’s room was when we almost gave up on the game. We stuck with it to see where the game led, and we’re delighted to report that the finish is intriguing, even if the journey to get there wasn’t. Rusty Lake Hotel feels like a teaser for a much longer story, one that requires background that isn’t provided. Things happen because they must for the plot to progress, not because they make sense. The proceedings have a gloomy atmosphere to them, but the absurd aspects, such as animal heads and poop, take away the Lynchian edge and make everything appear awkward and random.

This game is more on the fence between yea and nay than any other we’ve reviewed thus far. It’s mechanically thin, the puzzles are shoddy, and the story, if there is one, is marred by ridiculousness. However, if you realize what it asks of you and what it gives, it becomes a much easier ride, and the finale, in retrospect, was a very bright point of darkness that helped color the game. It’s difficult to recommend the Rusty Lake Hotel game, but we don’t regret playing it in the end, and we’re eager to see what else the series has to offer.

Overall, Rusty Lake Hotel is a fairly standard “escape room” flash game. We’ve played similar ones for free online in terms of length and difficulty. It can be frustrating because there is no save option, and if you miss something but still want to complete the game, your only option is to reset and start over. We have a hard time suggesting it to anyone who isn’t a die-hard lover of point-and-click adventure games, considering there are plenty of free flash games available. But, hey, it’s a nice little trip, so what the hell. Go for it if it’s only $2.

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