Rusty Lake Paradise

Rusty Lake Paradise is another game in the Cube Escape/Rusty Lake series, and in this one you play out each of the ten plagues. You know, the ones from the old testament that you read about in the Bible. While this game holds up in most regards, it's probably the weakest link in the series so far. The puzzles are varied and fun, but unfortunately you often have to repeat the same kind of puzzle several times over which gets dull after a while. The storyline is... well it's tied to the previous games and it's full of references to them. You can follow it somewhat, but as with the games in general it's quite abstract. I definitely recommend to play this if you want to get deeper into the Cube Escape/Rusty Lake game series, but besides that this one can probably be skipped. Unless you're a really big fan of the ten plagues that is!

The game is divided in 10 episodes (called Plagues, based on Egyptian Plagues from the Bible. Relax, knowledge of Bible is not necessary. On the contrary, you will learn Egyptian plagues in memorable way:).The game doesn't start well. Puzzles are ingenious but so easy that 10% of hem I got solved by themselves when I was still figuring out what the puzzle is. But over the time it is getting better and better. Say, from plague six upwards. Rusty Like vets would be disappointed firs but please don't give up at the beginning. There is RL macabresque dark sense of humor in all episodes just in few first it's rather grose than gruesome. If it's your first game from RL - go for it! If you have already done few games from RL - be aware that his one starts with primitive clues...

This is easily the best game in the main trilogy, though if you liked the others, you'll probably like this, too. You solve different puzzles each day on the same island, creating little variations to the routine. Elizabeth is easily the best character; she's so weird! This is where a lot of the mythology comes together, if you've been following along. The story here is just as dark and twisted as the rest, even if it's easy to figure out how it ends right at the beginning.

This game is in the same vein of the previous Rusty Lake games (Hotel and Roots), and keeps the same "bunch of puzzles" format, but in my opinion it is worse than Roots and only borderline better than Hotel. The basic formula didn't change much, but now we have a series of linear chapters (eschewing the branching chapters from Roots). And instead of self-contained "rooms" like in previous games, now in every chapter you have an "overworld" that you travel in to get to places. This could have been interesting if there was actual exploration involved, but in practice this is a major step back because travelling around is incredibly annoying, requiring multiple presses and panning the screen. Pieces required to solve puzzles are scattered everywhere and puzzles have non-obvious and nonsensical solutions and sometimes require you to travel between several screens to solve a puzzle. This sours the experience immensely. Imagine being frustrated that you can't solve a puzzle only to be hampered by the fact that you need 5 clicks and 2 screen pans to go to the other side of the puzzle. As for the puzzles themselves, there is nothing ground-breaking here but this game is even more bizarre and disgusting than the previous two. You have actual people on "Paradise" but they are useless NPCs that blurt out one-liners, act goofy and seemingly are ok with being mutilated (but somehow survive until the end). The plot makes no sense. So, the game had some potential but it was wasted. This game is sometimes good, but often boring and annoying. Roots was better.