Rusty Lake: Roots Review

Rusty Lake have been making games in Flash for some time now, firstly with their Cube Escape series and more recently with the Rusty Lake games. Using their room escape expertise, the Rusty Lake team have been able to create one of the most uniquely horrifying games I’ve played, building perfectly on the foundations they set earlier this year with Rusty Lake Hotel.

In Rusty Lake: Roots, you must solve a series of puzzles across a branching family tree, controlling events involving three generations of the Vanderboom family after James Vanderboom plants a magical seed in his garden. These events involve the death of mostly everyone, and some exceptionally unusual births, and follow an overarching story of rebirth.

Roots follows Hotel’s artstyle, which worked really well for the strange animal-headed people needed last time out, but in Roots it looks a little strange, particularly when Mr. Crow shows up. In fact, as it turns out The Rusty Lake Hotel shares a coastline with the Vanderboom’s homestead, and several of the puzzles occur on the same time as the events of Hotel. No puzzles in Roots rely on knowledge from Hotel though, so you can play this without playing the last one.

The puzzles themselves are very typical adventure game, also known as “exceptionally obtuse”. I obviously won’t spoil any solutions, but an overarching theme of the game is the removal of body parts and placing them into jars as the solutions to puzzles. This game is messed up, and you barely even notice it without stepping back for a while and thinking about what you just did. This can make some of the puzzles even more dense and difficult to approach, because the solutions involve doing some weird stuff.

As with the Roots, after you’ve completed the main story you can go back and try to complete additional objectives. While it is possible to start these before you reach the end of the story, it was only with the hint that you’re given at the end of the main story that I even discovered anything. You receive an additional - and incredibly disturbing - scene that ties everything together nicely, and it gives a lot of closure to what was a rather messy storyline.

Rusty Lake: Roots is not an especially long game, and I completed it in around four hours. I don’t think I’d want any more, and for such a low price I’d be greedy if I asked for it. After a long time of playing free games in this genre, it’s very refreshing to see something a little more premium; the additional polish and voice acting adding the £2 value easily.

I really enjoyed Rusty Lake: Roots, though it suffers from its genre with puzzles that can be a little too ridiculous and a Flash-based platform that’s occasionally difficult to work with. Those aside, Roots is an excellent follow up to Hotel and I can only hope that there will be more Rusty Lake in the future because they’re only getting better.