Gav played: Rusty Lake (series)
The Games: Rusty Lake by Rusty Lake + Second Maze
Score: I love them
Oh, what’s that? Rusty Lake is a Twin Peaks-inspired setting created by a small Dutch studio--and they make simply the best room escape games I’ve ever played. The series has enormous intelligence and personality, both charming and disturbing, mysterious but not insubstantial. It also stands out for varied and high-quality puzzles, and an overarching story that keeps exploration interesting. The lake is home to quests for immortality and reincarnation, memories stored in strange cubes, time travel, shapeshifting, weird machines, magic rituals, murder investigations, and Vincent Van Gogh.
There are a lot of games! The studio has just celebrated their 5th anniversary, and has released 15 games in the world of Rusty Lake. The link I provided above lists the games newest to oldest. I think the best order is the one they were released in--so, starting with Cube Escape: Seasons. The Cube Escape games from Seasons to The Cave, the first act of Cube Escape: Paradox, and Samsara Room are free; Hotel, Roots, Paradise, Paradox Act 2, and The White Door are less than $5 each. If you bought the Itch Bundle for Racial Justice, you own The White Door, and you’ll be fine playing it first! The player character(s) and time period bounce around from game to game, no matter what order you choose.
(From Rusty Lake Hotel.)
You said it’s a horror series--content warnings? The big ones are themes of surreality, murder, and suicide. There is some gore, some animal harm, and a variety of disturbing images and situations, but the horror is mostly effected by building an atmosphere of wrongness. If you begin with The White Door, know that the player character has initially been trapped by an organization posing as a mental health institute.
Hearing disorder corner: I don’t remember any puzzle or clue relying on sound--spoken dialogue is accompanied by speech bubbles, and musical puzzles are accompanied by visible music notes. I’ve sometimes found the music puzzles difficult, but never in a way that writing out the clues didn’t fix. If you begin with Seasons, the first speech you will reach will sound distorted. It’s not your ears acting up! It was recorded using the same “spoken backward, played forward” technique used by Michael J. Anderson when he played The Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks.
Anything else? Only that I’ve followed the series for most of five years, and enjoyed each game enough to play them repeatedly, my interpretation of events growing and changing with each new release!
Try them if you like: Twin Peaks (obvs), small-town horror, layered mysteries, a newfound suspicion of the Tootsie Pop spokesowl, vintage wallpaper, non-linear stories, the Submachine games, multi-generational drama.