I'm a big fan of point and click adventure games, especially when they're within the horror genre, so I was very excited to play Rusty Lake Hotel considering its warm reception. Unfortunately, this one didn't do it for me.

The art-style is lovely and the overall ambience quite on point. I also found the puzzles to be quite entertaining, even though some of them were a bit obscure in their solutions. The thing that didn't work for me here was the story, or more specifically a lack thereof.

To my understanding, the Rusty Lake franchise has some sort of deep lore permeating each one of their games, but I failed to catch a glimpse of that with this entry. I do enjoy a story that takes effort to get, but here I just didn't find anything that would even allow me to theorise to some extent. I did catch glimpses of some potential narrative beats in some odd places, but nothing to allow any sort of coherent understanding to any degree.

I will be playing Roots next to see if that gets me anywhere, though based on some reviews I've seen it only further tangles everything up with no apparent answers, but I'll see for myself.

As for this title, get it if you like achievement hunting since it's easy to get them, but if you're looking for a coherent horror story you won't find one here, at least from my perspective.

The first rusty lake game i played and it was good

Rusty Lake Hotel is like a painting in a museum. It stays on the museum walls so we can talk about the time it came from, and how important web games were, how untethered stories could be when there was no censorship or limits. It's style and tone explore discomfort and death. Intensely but not deeply. A detailed frame on a painting that gets darker and more twisted the longer you stare. But years have gone now and the painting once provocative and gut wrenching is just kinda niche. The tone and puzzles are still fun, and the diversion is well priced. I just don't know how long this painting is going to hang at the museum of interest and common knowledge before we start to wonder what milestone painting should be hanging there instead. 6/10