The Rusty Lake games, very loosely speaking, are point-and-click adventures, but it's closer to the mark to describe them as strange, interactive narrative experiences, with hypnotic music, sedate narration, and an aura of death and menace hanging over everything. Rusty Lake Hotel, for instance, features nattily dressed woodland creatures who go for a vacation at a rustic hotel where they are murdered in bizarre, horrific ways, while Rusty Lake Paradise is a game about ancient Egyptian plagues and your mom.
A new game was added to the series yesterday called The White Door, and while it looks and sounds a lot like previous Rusty Lake games, the developers say that it's actually quite different from their previous releases, mechanically and in the more "personal" story it tells about a man named Robert, an employee at a bird seed company (which will likely prove relevant in some odd way) who's been institutionalized for... some reason.
"It was a big challenge for us to change the gameplay and puzzle mechanics we used to know, and also trying to create the most narrative based game we made so far," the developers said in the White Door announcement. "But after a year of hard work we can say that we are extremely proud we achieved this and that we can make something out of the ordinary, while remaining the Rusty Lake touch."
I've only played through the first day of the game so I can't say how deep down the creepyhole it goes, but that "touch" is definitely there, and followers of the series will also recognize one or two very specific elements in the launch trailer.
The White Door is available from Steam and Itch.io for $3/£2.50/€3. If you'd like to get a sense of what the series is like before chucking any money at it, Cube Escape: Paradox is free to play, and also very weird.
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