I wiggle a cloud and the lake goes dark, revealing patterns among the stars. I poke a cat and pick up its sick so I can glue back together a chair. I place fly eggs on grilled fish to sate my master’s guests, and I snip open a sutured wound to release the writhing thing inside. I hunt sport with my shotgun from the brow of a hill, some of them on their morning stroll. I neatly pack away severed fingers, then pluck shadow men from gnashing maws. And at one point I’ve got a screaming baby in my inventory too.
Servant of the Lake is not your average point-and-click adventure – as fans of the Rusty Lake series should well expect by now – and there’s something wonderful about the way it seems to weaponise the genre’s lost art of moon logic for its own nefarious ends.
I am, I should say, very much a fan of the Rusty Lake series. Over the course of a decade and 18 games – each ranging from a couple of quid to completely free – Rusty Lake’s eponymous developer has honed its deceptively clever mix of casual point-and-click adventuring, room-escape-style puzzling, and fascinatingly fragmented, centuries-spanning narrative into something special. As the series sews a vast tapestry of murder, dark magic, and shadowy horrors blighting multiple generations of the Vanderboom family, it’s by turns strange, macabre, haunting, often darkly funny, occasionally disturbing, and even quietly moving too.
There is, if you’re wondering, an officially recommended order to experience Rusty Lake’s labyrinthine tale, but each game is self-contained enough to be perfectly enjoyable on its own. And that’s true of the newly released Servant of the Lake, which whisks us back to 1839 and the Vanderboom estate roughly two decades before the events of the superb Rusty Lake: Roots. Here, you’re the new hired help – part butler, part confidante as the conspiratorial plot unfolds – called in to assist the Vanderboom family over three increasingly strange days.
If you’ve dipped into the Rusty Lake series before, you might, I suspect, feel a tinge of disappointment upon first brush with Servant of the Lake. It eschews the bold structural and narrative experimentation of the series’ newer games in favour of more traditional point-and-clickery, meaning you shouldn’t expect anything like the clever co-op puzzling of 2022’s excellent The Past Within, for instance, or the striking split-frame comic book stylings of 2020’s The White Door. Or even 2023’s touching Underground Blossom, which turned a station-to-station metro ride into a journey through its protagonist’s lifetime.
But what it lacks in showiness, it makes up for in puzzles. As your three days on the Vanderboom estate play out – each split into a morning, afternoon, evening, and night of Vanderboom family demands – Servant of the Lake is dense with puzzles. There are tiny tactile things, great big room spanning things; some are largely discrete, and others are nested and nested and nested again. Some are breezily straightforward – flick a switch, turn a knob – some are decidedly more cerebral, and there’s a real richness of pace and variety across its five-or-so-hour runtime. You’ll do palate cleansing scavenger hunts between the locked room biggies; encounter classic casual staples – sliding tiles or shredded scraps – albeit usually with a twist. You’ll bolster your inventory for use-this-on-that point-and-clicking; and there are other, more ambitious bits.
Throughout it all, the Rusty Lake team wields its own distinctive brand of moon logic like a weapon. (Moon logic, says etymology site Haggard Hawks, is the “wildly convoluted or counterintuitive thinking required to understand a seemingly impenetrable puzzle or plotline.” And it’s a phrase that gained prominence during the adventure games boom of the 90s, used to describe the kind of confounding design exemplified by Gabriel Knight 3’s infamous cat-moustache-syrup puzzle, in which the hero embarks on a convoluted attempt to manufacture a moustache in order to disguise himself as his bafflingly non-moustachioed friend.)
At first, amid its bucolic vistas and gentle bird song, Servant of Lake’s tasks seem unremarkable; you’ll find a carrot, feed a horse, and make some breakfast too. But gradually the mood tilts into something more sinister. Your first real taste of horror comes early on, as you assist your master with his morning shave. Suddenly there’s blood, an earlobe in your inventory, and it’s here – as you feed the fleshy nubbin to a crow for a key – the comforting logic of reality dims.
Before long, you’re manipulating the heavens as if that’s a perfectly ordinary thing for a butler to do, or palpating writhing offal to divine mysterious codes, or tweaking a man’s teeth to titillate his saliva glands and quell a raging inferno. It feels like an endless non-sequiter of puzzle design that should be infuriating in its nonsense – except, of course, it’s not real moon logic at all.
Rather, it’s a sneaky illusion; a surreal obfuscation of smartly designed puzzle threads that means Rusty Lake gets to have its fly-riddled cake and eat it: revelling in its intentionally destabilising strangeness, while maintaining the intuitive interior logic of a dream. It’s a hallmark of the series, true, but the eerie unreality, the deliciously off-kilter ambience, feels particularly pronounced here given the sheer wealth of puzzles – and the skill of a studio who, with each new release, exhibits evermore masterful control of tone.
In Servant of the Lake, quiet 19th century restraint – set against a backdrop of rolling hills and the gentle tinkling of a melancholy piano – jostles again macabre sight gags, increasingly phantasmagorical detours, and sudden eerie turns. Its cast talks with the grogginess of recent sleep or reads seemingly mundane lines with the simmering intensity of impending violence. Pair all that with the series’ starkly striking art style and its almost-moon logic, and it’s hard not to succumb to its woozily idiosyncratic mood.
Like I say, I bloody love this weird little series, and Servant of the Lake – despite being a relatively straightforward instalment on the surface – is a deceptively brilliant one. Give it a go, or try one of the others (the Cube Escape Collection is free on mobile, and the paid games are even cheaper than usual right now). A gloriously dark retreat from this searing hot summer awaits down by ancient waters – just don’t blame me if you regret finding out what the butler saw.
