Zarf Updates

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!)

I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake knockoff. These are pretty common; creepy-haunted is not a complicated vibe. I've got a whole folder on these on my iPad. The Strange Case series; Hotel Orpheus; Forgotten Hill...

...My folder is labelled "Submechanical", because when I first played a Rusty Lake game -- or "Cube Escape", as it was titled back then -- I decided it was a Submachine knockoff. It turned out to be a speciation event instead; but of course that's hindsight. My point is that there's nothing wrong with being a knockoff, especially at three bucks on the mobile store.

Now I have played both the new Rusty Lake and a new batch of "if you enjoyed that, why not try...?"

• Servant of the Lake
• Hidden Town (series)

Servant of the Lake

• by Rusty Lake -- game site

This year's Rusty Lake experiment is... realism? Okay, not really. But Servant of the Lake is distinctively not set in a hallucinatory dream-box. It's populated by living (if Gorey-esque) Vanderbooms, not corrupted souls. And you are almost certainly not dead.

Not to say that the Rusty Lake crew has never taken this tack. But Servant of the Lake has a more grounded storyline than most of the series. You arrive at the manor house as an extra hand, helping Aldous Vanderboom and his housemaid with a weekend family gathering. You will clean, cook, and serve dinner for three days. Then you will depart.

The game is framed around that schedule and your task list. Also the manor, which opens up as you progress through the weekend. It's a steadier basis than we usually get. And while there are plenty of puzzles mixed in, you're generally after some straightforward goal like "porridge". ...Until you're not, of course.

It's a pretty substantial game overall. The individual tasks are bite-sized, but there's a lot of them. Then there's a big list of side tasks which you can go back to if optional-bonus-stars are your thing. They're generally not my thing, but there's also a hint of extra storyline which I have not yet investigated. Hm.

I know it sounds weird to say that linear time and a mappable world are delightful innovations. For once, they are. Expectations, ya know? I'm sure that the next venture to Rusty Lake will be off-beat in a different direction.

By the by, I name-dropped "Vanderbooms" as if we all knew the Rusty Lake continuity by heart. In fact I cheerfully disregard it. There's a family tree in one of the games, isn't there? No clue how Servant fits in. It has a 19th-century vibe (you arrive in a horse-drawn carriage) but nothing is definitive. If there's some kind of over-arching plotline, the developers have never tried to sell me on remembering it.

Hidden Town (series)

• by Dark Dome -- game site

As I said, I occasionally browse the App Store for this kind of game. A couple of weeks ago one popped up with the title Hidden Memories. This was, in fact, a series of nine games that launched on iOS all at once. No, it's not somebody turning a vibe-coding crank. It's a studio called Dark Dome which has been releasing games on Android for years; then they got ported to iOS en masse. Also coming to Steam at the end of this month! I don't know if they'll break out, but the devs are giving it their best shot.

So what are the Hidden Town games like? You've already gotten the idea. You're locked in a room, or a few rooms. Something Creepy Happened. There's locked doors and drawers and cabinets. Each one requires either a key or a four-symbol combination. Combinations are hidden in modestly clever clues or environmental puzzles. Repeat until shocking conclusion.

I'm making it sound rather formulaic, but really that's just because I binged several years' worth of games in a week. I did that because they're pleasant and diverting and when you finish one you're happy to jump into another one.

The games are on the narrative side, like Servant. But Hidden Town doesn't have the hard edge of Rusty Lake. It doesn't go for body-fluid humor, and the characters are all cuties. (As opposed to the haunt-raddled wrecks who populate Rusty Lake.) Then again, the cute art only adds to the sting when somebody turns out to be evil or possessed or whatever's on this week. Hidden Town isn't a happy place.

One minor confusion: each game ends with an epilogue chapter labelled "Premium Content". On iOS, this is not a separate add-on; it's part of the base game, which you pay for up front. (I guess the iOS versions are all "premium content".) I assume it worked differently in Android-land. My guess is that Steam will work like iOS, but we'll see.

As with Rusty Lake, the games are lightly tied together. The epilogue chapters generally feature characters from other stories dropping in or getting caught up. As with Rusty Lake, this is flavor, not crucial. You can play the games in any order, and you definitely don't have to make a crazy-string wall to keep track of the connections.

The Dark Dome developers are based in Peru. The English localization (or writing, I don't know their process) is sometimes shaky. On the up side, they can mix a bit of authentic Inca mythology into the general cult-creepy setting. They don't go overboard it with; only a couple of of the games really delve into that aspect. But it's a nice change of pace from "witches".

An enjoyable binge, anyhow.