If you’ve been reading Eurogamer for any length of time there’s a good chance you’ve already seen me harp on about the shamefully overlooked Rusty Lake series. It’s a wonderfully macabre thing; strange, haunting, often unexpectedly disturbing, but also brilliantly accessible, and cheap as chips too. I love it, and will never stop telling people about it in a bid to share that love, so here I am again now that new game Servant of the Lake has been revealed.
Before we get onto the new stuff, though, a bit of background might be in order, seeing as Rusty Lake is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and has one hell of a back catalogue to enjoy. Not including Servant of the Lake, the series now consists of 18 games and a short film; some are fully fledged premium offerings – usually lasting a couple of hours and most often released under the Rusty Lake label – while the rest, known as Cube Escape, are shorter (and somewhat less polished) free-to-play companion pieces.
By and large, though, all follow the same basic formula, melding casual point-and-click puzzling with room-escape-style conundrums. And with a few notable exceptions, the key word is “casual”; these are brilliantly accessible adventures, most memorable for their irresistibly macabre ambience, and the fascinating history of the mysterious Vanderboom family at their centre, rather than any radical design convolutions.
Early games are pretty shameless in their debt to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal TV series Twin Peaks (right down to a murder victim called Laura and a detective called Dale), but it doesn’t take long for developer Rusty Lake to establish its own deeply weird, and decidedly idiosyncratic lore. And with each entry usually approaching the story from a radically different direction – one, for instance, plays out during a horrifically doomed birthday party, and another takes place entirely from within a cardboard box – it all adds up to a wonderfully sinister (and narratively intertwined) saga of standalone adventures.
Traditionally, I’ve tended to recommended Rusty Lake: Roots as a good starting point – it’s a beautiful and surprisingly moving tale, charting three generations of the Vanderboom family, from 1860 to 1935, as they live and die in the same house. Other standouts, though, include The White Door, which does some striking things with its engaging split-screen presentation; and if you wanted to see developer Rusty Lake really flexing its design chops, there’s the deeply impressive The Past Within, which reimagines the series’ familiar formula as a brain-melting co-op experience that demands constant communication as two players navigate the same room in different time periods.
It is, to reiterate, consistently fantastic – and often overlooked – stuff. All of which bring us to Servant of the Lake, the series’ first premium entry since 2023’s Underground Blossom, which took players on a journey through the life and memories of Laura Vanderboom as she travelled from one station to the next. As its name suggests, Servant of the Lake – a more traditional single-player point-and-click adventure – finds yet another new perspective to tell its story, this time visiting the Vanderboom House in the decades prior to Rusty Lake: Roots, as seen through the eyes of its housekeeper. “Solve the puzzles needed to fulfil your daily tasks,” teases its blurb, “look after the household, welcome the visitor and ensure their comfort while helping the family achieve their alchemical ambitions!” Death, darkness, and other assorted weirdness – usually involving saucer-eyed shadowmen – will almost inevitably ensure.
There’s no release date for Servant of the Lake yet, but this nebulous window between now and its eventual arrival would seem, if I might be so bold, to be the perfect opportunity to catch up on earlier events in the Vanderboom saga if it’s so far passed you buy. Better still, the bulk of the saga – which was already absurdly inexpensive to start with – is currently discounted on Steam to celebrate Servant of the Lake’s reveal. The Cube Escape Collection, for instance – which includes nine smaller-scale games – costs £2.99, while the premium Rusty Lake titles cost between £1.19 and £3.99. Oh, and there’s an £18.11 bundle containing everything too! All this, I should say, works on both Mac and PC, and if you’d rather take the no-money-now approach, the Cube Escape series is free to download on iOS and Android. Thank you for listening to my TED talk on Rusty Lake. I will now be taking questions.
