Rusty Lake Hotel Review

The year is 1893, and the place is The Rusty Lake Hotel. You are in charge of preparing and serving meals to the five guests of the hotel. For each meal completed a set of stars is given compared to how good the dish were, and if you used any optional ingrediences. Five meals is needed to be created, which ‘coincidentally’ aligns with the number of guests staying at te hotel. You progress through the game by completing puzzles, some to gain the extra ingredients for each dish, but ultimatly to kill off each of the inhabitants in order to cook them into a meal.

The five guests of the hotel are as follows: Mr. Rabbit, Mr. Boar, Mr. Deer, Ms. Pheasant and Mrs. Pigeon. The hotel itself is staffed by Mr. Bat, the piccolo, Mr. Crow at the main desk, Mr. Toad the chef and finally Mr. Owl, the owner of Hotel Rusty Lake. These animorphic creatures serves as the characters of this first installment of the franchise. Over the next five days within the Hotel the player takes part in killing off each of the hotel guests, and watching the rest of the guests eating dinner, unaware of what (or whom) they are eating.

After having killed off the last remaining guest of the hotel the player is treated to a conversation with Mr. Owl sitting in his room thanking the player for all the memories. He tells you to look at the black cubes. Looking around the room you hover over the black cubes, showing off the corrupted souls of the now-killed guests.

Rusty Lake Hotel is a point-and-click game like no other. It is extraordinarily creepy with great art styles and a weird, weird story. The puzzles are overtly morbid (and sometimes quite hard), having you to execute your hotel guests in gruesome ways, everything from poisoning to splitting their heads open – just to watch Mr. Toad cooking them up the following evening. The art style is very unique, there is not usually a lot going on in each frame, but that doesn’t really matter. The intrigue comes from the morbidity of the story and the gameplay.

The characters are nicely done, some even menacing. Wandering around the hotel you feel creeped out, and a bit like a creeper yourself, from being an accomplice to everything happening. The music is very ambient, creepy and fitting. The only minus is the voice over, that sort of sounds like it is done through a quite outdated microphone. This might sound like it could be fitting to the tone of the game but it does come off as cheap instead of intentional (if it ever was to be so).

So, if you enjoy the morbid Rusty Lake Hotel is right down your alley. The puzzles can be hard but the atmosphere and the narrative is spectacular. It is a breath of fresh air to the genre, and albeit being a very short game it is definatly one worth picking up. It is creepy, weird and humorous. It ends on sort of a cliff hanger, setting up the franchise for even more weirdness. The game is very cheap, even if you buy every game in the franchise. Which by all means is a big recommendation from here. Now go, cook up your hotel guests.