So many colons in the title of this post …
After playing Rusty Lake Hotel (link to my review) over the summer, I fell in love with the quirky and mysterious world of Rusty Lake and binge-played the other Cube Escape games on the Rusty Lake website. When I heard that they were adding a second premium game to their lineup of free-to-play games, I was really excited. It didn’t disappoint.
The premise of Rusty Lake: Roots differs from its predecessors. It takes a step away from the ongoing “plot” and mystique of Rusty Lake and focuses in on a single family – the Vanderbooms. Starting with James Vanderboom, the player goes through the literal family tree of his descendants and their descendants, completing the usual kinds of Cube Escape puzzles as they go. The art style continues to be phenomenal and I’m loving the added layers of intrigue to the world and its characters.
While the puzzles range from very easy to mind-bendingly tricky (though not outside of logic), I loved the way each scene connected to the next one, with the puzzles all representing something important. Nothing felt arbitrary, which is something that bothers me about some puzzle games.
Overall, there’s a lot of really solid narrative being delivered throughout the course of this game—almost all of it very implicit and symbolic (or is it?) It was a treat to play and words cannot really express how excited I am for further developments.
Of course, the only real criticism I can give here is that sometimes, for me, the puzzles got a little too sophisticated. Thankfully, Rusty Lake is good about providing a video walkthrough for all of their games in the event that you are a little stumped about where to go next. What can I say? My memory’s not always the best and a lot of these puzzles require remembering solutions you find elsewhere in the scene.
The music sets a really gloomy atmosphere for the game, perfect for the misadventure and tragedy that plagues the Vanderbooms.
I appreciated how the player could choose their own path in regards to which branches of the family tree they wanted to explore. For some cases, you have to complete certain scenes to unlock parts of other branches, but for the most part you are free to pick and choose which family members you would like to focus on, switching back and forth as you pleased. Even after playing it once, I’ve gone back to it several times and enjoyed the story all over again, going in different orders to see if it changes my perception of the story and its characters. In some cases, it’s led to finding out about character deaths before they’ve actually “happened” because I’ve skipped ahead in the timeline from choosing one path over another. The amount of detail in each scene isn’t exactly rich, but there is a lot to take in and every puzzle fits into the environment so well.
All in all, it’s a great experience for a surprisingly low price ($3.29 CDN) that is definitely worth picking up if you’re a fan of the Cube Escape games. You can purchase it on Steam here.
It’s hard, sometimes, to review games that I really like, since I struggle with expressing my thoughts. When it comes to puzzle games, or ones with plot twists, it is even more difficult as I don’t want to give away any solutions or spoilers. This is one of those cases. It’s not an expensive game and I firmly believe in supporting creators, especially considering that most of the games they put out are free to play on their website. Aside from Rusty Lake Hotel, you can enjoy the world they are assembling for absolutely nothing, so asking for ~$3.00 for a game of satisfactory length and substance is hardly a huge setback. But that’s just my opinion.
juliameadows 