Game Review: The Rusty Lake Games
tl;dr stop reading this, just go buy The Cube Escape collection on Steam, see if you like it, buy and play Rusty Lake Hotel, Rusty Lake: Roots, and Rusty Lake Paradise in that order
Note: I haven’t played any Rusty Lake games released after Rusty Lake Paradise
Just as I would if I had access to a cloning machine, I’m likely dating myself here. I grew up on an Internet where Flash games were popular, and for people who enjoyed the spookier things in life, there was nothing better than a good ol’ fashioned ‘escape the room’ Flash game. Nowadays, physical escape room experiences are more popular than the games, but they found their origins in these humble Flash games.
Note that this post contains spoilers because this game does have disturbing content.
Nobody does escape the room games better than Rusty Lake. Trust me, I’ve looked. Rusty Lake (the name of both the game studio and the series) released 100% free escape the room games via Flash game websites like Kongregate and on the mobile app stores, starting with April 2015’s release of “Cube Escape: Seasons.” With December 2015’s release “Rusty Lake Hotel,” Rusty Lake started selling premium escape the room games. These games don’t have any in-app purchases or pay-to-win/solve mechanics, don’t worry.
I started playing the Rusty Lake games when Rusty Lake Hotel was released. I played through all the available Rusty Lake games before playing Hotel. I played the next premium games, Rusty Lake: Roots, at launch. The same applies to their third premium game, Rusty Lake Paradise.
These games still hold up in 2026.
If you’re going to get into these games now, get The Cube Escape collection on Steam first and play through the games in order. There’s 9 games, of varying lengths. My stream of the games took about seven and a half hours, so without breaks, and with more smarts, it’ll likely take someone six and a half hours to beat. I think for $4.99, that’s a pretty good deal. There were only maybe 5 puzzles where I audibly said ‘that’s kinda bullshit’ in that there wasn’t a clue that would make it clear that you needed to do something. I’d say the weakest puzzles were any of the puzzles that required timing, and specifically, the cabin puzzle with a time limit for the entire level.
What makes the Rusty Lake games unique compared to other escape the room games:
Consistent worldbuilding: There is a shared world of characters, terms, and lore between the games.
Unique worldbuilding: Mixing Gothic themes, Buddhist terms, alchemy, and an art style that’s becoming increasingly rare, the world of Rusty Lake stands out.
Unique puzzles: The games don’t tend to recycle puzzles over and over like some other series do, and the puzzles presented are often puzzles I haven’t seen in any other games before.
Good balance of difficulty and fairness: There were very few times we had to look at a guide to solve a puzzle, and many of the puzzles were thinkers.
Really disturbing gameplay: We fed a dog a man’s arm to get the dog to defecate to turn the dog feces into something else via alchemy. We fed someone sandwiches filled with their own feces. A man in a well was thirsty so we gave him dog urine in a cup to drink. These are all non optional situations in the game. There’s a lot of gorgeous puzzles. There’s a good number of gross-out puzzles. If you have a light stomach, this may not be for you.
There’s replay value if…
…you want to try for different endings
…you want to try the games in different orders (e.g. release vs. in-game chronology)
…you want to do some more lorecrafting yourself
These games are weirdly enough a lot like Solitaire in that the controls are very easy and usually don’t require high reaction times, so if you have a friend who likes the type of world explored in the Rusty Lake games, and they’re not a gamer, this may be the game for them.
