Rusty Lake Paradise

Continuing the tradition set by the previous premium Rusty Lake games, Paradise offers a lot more content than its Cube Escape siblings and ties up a lot of loose ends in the story. It actually leaves a considerable amount of the story developments up to interpretation, but the rest of the series has helped me to understand the world well enough that I felt pretty confident in my interpretations. The background knowledge established in this title felt a lot less important than that of the previous two premium entries, but it was engaging enough that I didn't mind too much.

Playing as an inhabitant of Rusty Lake's Paradise island, you return home in order to help your cult-like family escape the plagues they're facing. The gameplay is very familiar, asking you to interact with your environment and collect items to solve puzzles. New to this game is the ability to explore the entire island, rather than just individual rooms or stages. Unfortunately, the Rusty Lake formula isn't entirely conducive to free exploration, with navigation between areas feeling a lot like a Professor Layton game where your need to click on a specific place on the screen to move to the next area. However, Paradise adds the stumbling block of scrolling screens that only open up navigation when you scroll to a certain spot. The amount of movement back and forth between locations made this more than just a minor inconvenience for me. The puzzles often played off of the navigational freedom too, asking you to memorize something from one or more places and input it in another spot. It was nice that the puzzles in Paradise couldn't really be replicated in another game, but they just weren't very fun or memorable to play.

With a less important story and some unfortunate mechanical frustrations, Rusty Lake Paradise was easily the least impressive premium title in the series. However, Cube Escape: The Cave introduced a big question that I didn't even realize I had, and Paradise went a long way to answer it. This title also has all of the dark and eerie charm that we've come to expect from the series, so it was still enjoyable enough to play. I would probably wait for a sale to pick this one up though.

The game is available on Steam here (as of 5/9/21): https://store.steampowered.com/app/744190/Rusty_Lake_Paradise/
The game is available for iOS here (as of 5/9/21): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rusty-lake-paradise/id1253855339

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