By DarkestCcino Watch 1 Favourite 0 Comments 1K Views

You can call this a continuation of the status I made after I beat Cube Escape: Paradox chapter 2, but there is a lot more I have to say about this amazing puzzle game series and some things that have changed after I dwelled on them.



First of all, I am changing how I rank the Rusty Lake games on steam. On my status I said the ranking went Roots>Paradox>Hotel>Paradise. However, after thinking about it, I am changing it to Roots>Hotel>Paradox>Paradise.



The reason for this is that I really shouldn't excuse the clock puzzle in chapter 2 of the game, as I still don't know how you were supposed to get the answers from the information you're given, and I shouldn't excuse that just because I could brute force the puzzle answer. The rules you must follow to beat any game in this series is asking yourself "Why would they allow me to click on this?" and "Why would they show me this piece of information?". It is still hard when following these, but when you give up and look up a guide you can see in retrospect what you did wrong, how you should have gotten it and how you should have followed those rules better. But the clock puzzle goes against that, so I count that against the game even if it can be brute forced.



In comparison, Hotel has probably three best difficulty in the entire Rusty Lake/Cube Escape series. I only needed to look up a guide two times throughout the game, once for the water moving puzzle in Mr.Deer's room (which is infamously difficult in the fanbase's eyes) and a radio puzzle in Ms.Pidgeon's room that I really should have gotten in retrospect. The bonus objectives to get the full content are a little absurd, but they still manage to follow those aforementioned rules (and are nothing compared to the Secrets in Paradise). Plus Hotel also has really good themes in it, with it feeling really disturbing when it wants to and makes you feel forced to do things, all while strangely happy music plays. It is unnerving and I love it.



You might notice that I have kept Roots and Paradise in the places they were. Because, well, those were easy picks for me.



As I have said before, Rusty Lake: Roots is one of my favorite games of all time, and easily the best puzzle game I have seen. Whether that is from its story, its clever puzzles or having the best mindf*** moment I have ever seen in a game that makes perfect sense once you think about it and actually makes the game make more sense when you go forward from it (the specifics I will not spoil), it is a complete masterpiece of a game. In fact, it was so good that part way through, I was legitimately starting to get sad from all the enjoyment I was having because I knew it would come to an end.



Paradise on the other hand, that game is interesting because of how well it holds up on your initial playthrough, but then falls apart when you look at it in retrospect or go back to replay certain levels (which the game encourages you to do, I'll get to that later). The keyword here is "immersion", and it succeeds on keeping you immersed when you play it at first. But once you think back, that's when you realize things like how in the "Flies", level, flies only appeared in like three spots. Or how in the Darkness level (what I consider to be the most fun one in the game) every action you do is literally just so that you can scare an owl off of a box, and then you just immediately get the item you win the level with inside of the box. When playing through it at first, character lines like "The smell of death is in the air" or "They're everywhere!" go from seeming like natural dialogue to artificial, tell-don't-show ways of conveying what is supposed to be happening in the level.



In the Mosquito level of Rusty Lake: Paradise, is is really unnerving the first time you play it and with seeing all the characters hiding in different places. But after that, you realize that besides the spots where they are hiding, the rest of the level is pretty normal and calm. In fact, "calm" really describes what most levels actually are, in spite of what they try to be.



While you could say that the normal player wouldn't notice these things, the problem with that is that the game actually encourages the player to analyze the levels to notice these things with its "Secrets" and the Steam achievements tied to each one. Many of the Secrets require the player to use items in places outside the normal use for them to get them. However, you need to use the items for the use to get the Secret before you consume the item by using it for the normal use in the level, otherwise the Secret becomes unobtainable and you need to restart (for example, you need to give a flute item to a certain character before you give it to the main character it is intended for, as she will keep it). Because of this, in order to get the Secrets, you need to actually analyze every last part and action of a level and make irrational decisions, completely destroying your immersion as you analyze everything.



It is for these reasons that I consider Rusty Lake: Paradise to be the weakest of the games available on Steam. Shame too, since there really were some good moments in it and it had one of the stronger stores in the series (obviously not as good of a story as Roots though, nothing can top that game in any area).



Now, so far I have only talked about the games on Steam and none of the ones that can be played on the Rusty Lake website for free. Although it has been a while since I have played them, I would like to give my thoughts on those.



If I am to rank the free online games, I would rate them Mill>Cave>Seasons>Theatre>Arles>Case 23>Cabin>Harvey's Box>Birthday. Let me break each of these apart to say why I chose this order.



Mill



The most underrated of the games in my opinion. While the other games have you work at one room at a time, Mill has three rooms you navigate between to beat it, making it the most spacious if them. Plus the puzzles are easy, fair and understandable.

The only bad things I can really say about it are that the item names are a bit crude, and the story isn't that great. I'm still not really sure who you are playing as in this game.



Cave



I think this is the hardest game in the series that is still fair. Remember the rule that everything shown to you has a meaning and you can get through alright. But what really makes this so good is its attention to the grander story with its callbacks, as this game was made right after Rusty Lake: Roots.

A lot of people say they don't like the second half of this game while the first half is fun. I'll agree with them to some extent, but I don't think the second half is terrible. It is still intriguing by it's own right.



Seasons



I think this is what most people started the series on, and that is nice. Seasons does a good job at revealing itself to be more than just your standard flash escape game as it goes on and introducing players to the surrealist and unnerving nature of Rusty Lake. The music is wondrous and the story is also great, with it being very fair at the same time.

There isn't much bad things to say about Seasons, which is why I rate it so high. I put it below Cave and Mill though because I like the gameplay of Mill more as well as the story of Cave.



Theatre



Call it nostalgia as this was my first real game I played, but this I just found to be fun. The puzzles I got stuck on made sense in retrospect (and I think I would have gotten through if I knew those rules) but it is really the disturbing moments that makes this one for me. Since you are going through a sort of recreation of a character's memories instead of in reality, there is a lot of surrealist and unnerving stuff in this one.



Arles



Great premise, great references to real world events, good puzzles, fair difficulty, but the problem is that it just doesn't connect to the rest of the story.

All Arles does for the grander story of Rusty Lake is that it tells you in what country the lake is located in and that's it. And for a series with a really complicated and deep story, that's a problem.



Case 23



I hope you play this on the official Rusty Lake website instead of elsewhere, as the website saves your progress while sites like Armorgames don't, and oh boy is this game long.

The game had 4 chapters in it in total. The first two were great. The 3rd is a little to hard in my opinion (having a tile sliding puzzle which is something my brain doesn't know how to do) and the 4th is on a limited timer for some reason, with it resetting whenever you run out of time. That timed section is the reason why most people don't like this game (and I don't blame them for it, as I have never technically beaten the game myself). It says a lot when literally no where else in the series is there a times section like the one in Case 23.

Timed section aside, Case 23 excels in atmosphere (which the entire Rusty Lake series is good at). You play as a detective character in this game, and man does it make you feel like that with what you are put through.



Cabin



A lot of people has this as their least favorite, which is directly because of its length. While all the other games have multiple rooms you go through or have the room drastically change as it goes along to effectively be a new room, Cabin doesn't and it is just a single room. There is also the issue of its multiple endings and how in order to get the good ending, you need to reuse a code from Seasons (which you might not have even played before this ones). Also, there's not much of a story in this one.

The reason I don't have this as the worst of the online games is because it is still fair with its puzzles. Unlike...



Harvey's Box



This game is good at mindf***ing you as well as putting you in a seemingly helpless perspective with how small your player character is to what is around you. It is the closest the series has felt to giving you something akin to cosmic horror (also known as 'lovecraftian horror') and the impussiance makes for a really interesting experience.

But what counts against this game was one dang music puzzle near the start that is just poorly designed. You have to play a song to progress, but the problem is that what you have to play is given in the form of a music sheet, but the instrument is labeled in the actual names of the notes (Like "C#"). So unless you are a musician who already knows what that stuff is, you have to constantly flip between the sheet and the instrument with an unholy amount of work on scratch paper to keep track of all your tests to figure out what's what. At which point: God help you if you write any of the notes down incorrectly on your paper.

Harvey's Box also shares a bit of the problem with Arles that it barely adds anything to the grander story. The only thing it does it that is shows how Harvey is a more important character to the story and not just a recurring set piece, and more about what happened during Seasons. The fact that this game takes place in the middle of when Cube Escape: Seasons is also pretty complicated.



Birthday



This is the hardest the series has gotten, and not in any fair way. In particular is one puzzle where you have to arrange banners in a certain order (there being four sets in total) and while three of the sets are good, one of them is nonsensically difficult to figure out. Apparently you are supposed to figure it out off of a painting, but even knowing that I still cannot figure out how you could have possibly gotten the answer off of what the painting displays. What makes it worse is that the painting is used in a later puzzle with putting stamps on it. So going by the rule of asking yourself "Why would they show me this piece of information/let me click on this?" that would be answered in a different way so you would have no idea that this is connected to the party banners you have to arrange. I haven't even the slightest clue how anyone was supposed to figure that out.

Even beyond the gigantic roadblock, there are multiple others puzzles that are just way too hard to figure out (like having to draw a tree on a window).

But honestly, it is a real shame that Birthday has to be like this. It has one of the best stories in the series, great moments and an ending that almost brings a tear to my eye. I really wish I could put it higher on the list, if these absurd roadblocks didn't prevent you from seeing the good stuff.





Well, that is my thoughts on the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape series. Two new games are coming out in 2019, so I will get those games when they come out and say my opinions on them. I think I also want to say my thoughts on the story of Rusty Lake along with my theories of it, and Paradox chapter 2 has given me much to talk about in that area.



Addendum: I have been informed that the banner puzzle in Birthday worked drastically different from how I thought it worked, and after a quick replay I see that the game is actually a lot more fair than what I had thought. For that reason I am changing the ranking to Mill>Cave>Seasons>Theatre>Birthday>Arles>Case 23>Cabin>Harvey's Box.