Perhaps you’re already familiar with developer Rusty Lake’s eponymous puzzle series, but if you’re not that isn’t entirely surprising. Despite an enthusiastic fan base, the Rusty Lake games – and their free-to-play companion series Cube Escape – are yet to receive much in the way of mainstream recognition and acclaim. Which is a shame! They’re wonderfully macabre things, combining atmospheric, casual room escape puzzling with some point-and-click flair. But it’s the vast, interconnected plot that really sets the series apart, each self-contained title ricocheting back and forth along a gleefully grim timeline of grisly murder, shadowy rituals, and resurrection. It’s another kind of mystery in a series all about mysteries, and with Rusty Lake’s latest project – the marvellously ambitious co-op puzzler The Past Within – now here, Eurogamer set forth to find out more about the unassuming Amsterdam studio.
Rusty Lake, the developer, was founded in 2015 by friends and occasional collaborators Maarten Looise and Robin Ras. Before that, Looise, who was studying landscape architecture, had enjoyed decent success making news-inspired Flash games in his spare time, while Ras, who was studying law, ran a number of gaming portals. It was when their paths crossed online, while Ras was looking to collaborate with developers for his website, that a successful working partnership was born.
Their early output – small games based on current events, inspired by everything from Prince Harry to Edward Snowden – enjoyed moderate success, but their fleeting topical relevance was, as Ras and Looise saw it, an increasing problem. “I enjoyed it so much, and the collaboration with Robin always went really well,” Looise tells me, “but the Flash games were always in the news for a week, and then it was over. So we wanted to make something more lasting.”
“We wanted to go for something more meaningful, that would actually create a community,” Ras adds. “We wanted people waiting for the next game instead of doing a completely different game the next time.”
And so Rusty Lake was born, the studio’s name inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – whose surreal, small town mysteries continue to influence the developer’s output to this day. “We wanted to have this place where anything can happen [for our stories],” explains Ras. “So we were really looking for a mysterious name as well.” But while the parallels with Lynch’s seminal series are obvious – the studio even tipped a hat to the director’s work by naming two characters Laura and Dale in its early games – the world of Rusty Lake owed just as much to one of Looise’s previous creations, Samsara Room, whose pre-occupation with shadow creatures and cyclical rebirth would become a hallmark of the Rusty Lake games.