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Crunch the incessant offness of Twin Peaks into a surprisingly beefy collection of point-and-click puzzle adventures and you’ve got Rusty Lake: Twisted tales of familial obligation and tradition unfolding in a backcountry idyll possessed by something better left unseen and unspoken. Imagine if ol’ Eddie Allen P. had been born a couple centuries later and took up game development, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the vibe. I’ve been looking forward to the latest addition to the series, Servant of the Lake, for quite some time now, and now that it’s out I’m happy to say that it is very good.
Servant of the Lake is something of a slow burn—I’ve been playing through it over the last four nights, and the first half of the game was suitably weird but more subdued than I expected. But once it starts rolling, the Vanderboom family at the center of the tale does not hold back.
If you’re familiar with Rusty Lake, Servant of the Lake is 100% in keeping with that tradition. It feels a little less forcefully bizarre than some other games in the series, and with a greater emphasis on mystery than horror. One thing that struck me is the game’s audio: The voice work is great but less disconnected from humanity than I remember from previous games, and the soundtrack is actually quite pleasant, particularly as the game progresses. It’s all still unsettling, but I wonder if Rusty Lake (which is also the name of the development team) wanted to avoid distracting from the story too much, for… reasons.
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Even so, weird is the Rusty Lake playbook and that’s definitely still the case. Servant of the Lake is ostensibly about signing on for a three-day gig as a servant in support of a big family reunion, but the work involved is not your everyday household drudgery. I fed a man porridge infested with houseflies, then cut off a chunk of his ear while shaving him, both of which he seemed oddly okay with—and this was on my first morning.
Later on I tried to kill a guy, and then watched a lady swallow a soul. What a weekend!
Puzzles in Servant of the Lake are fairly lightweight, and if you do get hung up (as I did, once) there’s plenty of help to be had from the community and the developers themselves, who have posted a full walkthrough. It’s also very linear: There are moments where it seems like you have a choice in matters, but your fate is predetermined so you don’t need to agonize over, say, the soup. (You’ll figure it out.)
Like other Rusty Lake games, what Servant of the Lake offers in place of freedom is secrets: The game is filled with them, and while they’re not essential to the experience, they do add to the ambiance, sometimes with references to previous games in the series. There’s a lot to dig into, and fortunately all chapters are replayable in any order once the game is finished, so it’s easy to go back and dig for what you missed.
I’m also happy to see that Servant of the Lake is making a good impression on other Rusty Lake fans. Less than a week after release, it holds an “overwhelmingly positive” rating on Steam across more than 4,500 reviews. Rusty Lake co-founder Robin Ras said it was “a great launch,” on par with the release of 2022’s The Past Within, the studio’s most successful game to date.
“Steam is our biggest platform and had a big peak of 28,000 concurrent users on the first day,” Ras told me. ” It seems a lot of fans wanted to play the game immediately. We already have more than 4,000 reviews, with an average of 98%.”
As for what comes next, Ras said the team has “plenty of ideas” for the future, and it’s also currently helping with another dark adventure, Falling Apart, that it’s publishing through the studio’s Second Maze label. “But first, we will focus a bit more on Servant of the Lake, because there’s more to it than people might think. :)”
I assume the smile is at least partly meant to be ominous.
Servant of the Lake is available now on Steam with a 25% launch discount, putting it at $6/£6/6€ until August 27. If you’d like to get a taste before you take a big bite, there;’s also a free demo.
