Rusty Lake Hotel
Review

Rusty Lake Hotel (2015) is a surreal point-and-click adventure with a tangential horror narrative. While set in the same universe as the other games in the Rusty Lake series, it tells its own standalone story that only shares loose connections with the other games. The strange humour and surreal horror elements along with its unique story, which sees you preparing a set of unusual meals for 5 guests, is what sets it apart.

In the Rusty Lake Hotel, five mysterious anthropomorphised animal guests arrive for a week-long stay, each with their own reasons for visiting and backstories to uncover. It's your job to prepare five meals for them to eat while they stay, and to uncover the hidden mystery lying beneath the surface.

The meals you give to the guests are ranked according to what optional ingredients you add to them, such as blackberries, rosemary and beans. To find these ingredients and other secrets, you need to solve strange logic-based puzzles that require you to think outside the box and come at them from lots of different angles, such as shocking the bird guest a certain number of times or putting a different amount of water in certain flasks.

It's a unique game that presents a different perspective on the Rusty Lake universe and offers a new selection of varied puzzles and clues to piece together the series' complex lore.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Rusty Lake Hotel 19 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 15 months ago.