Rusty Lake Hotel

1893. You work at the titular hotel, and are to procure meat by any means necessary. This is a dark comedy horror with gore. Given those, plus the fact that every character is a humanoid animal, there will be some toying with the distinction between those you tend to as guests, and the ones you serve as food. While it does present a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, it does leave certain questions unanswered that I presume are eventually answered elsewhere in, at least by the conclusion of, The entire Rusty Lake franchise, made by the team of the same name, which has been helpfully assembled into a bundle on Steam. Obviously the idea is that this spurs you on to get more of them, and while I will definitely hold out for a deal, I could absolutely see myself diving into more of this. It is the first and so far only - I imagine it will not be my last foray into the series.

The point and click genre has historically had somewhat slow and tedious gameplay, and I say that as someone who loves it and has played half a dozen titles, basically everything I could get my hands on. The thing is that way back when, you basically had to construct a sentence in order to get your character to do something. Later, the interface got to be considerably more user friendly. My favorite remains The Curse of Monkey Island where you can interact with something with your mouth(such as talking/eating), your eyes(looking at/through) and hand(picking up/pushing).

This one is as streamlined as at all possible. This works well if you want something that can be your introduction to this type of thing - if you love puzzles from other sources, like board games. Literally all you need in order to try this is to master basic mouse operation, the first thing you learn if you're sitting down with a computer in the post DOS era. It starts very small but by the end you really are dealing with some brain teasers that will challenge you. This features a lot of variety to them. There is a certain logic to many of them. Then there are some where you get clear hints sometimes even directions hidden in code. And some you simply have to guess. I would definitely say at least one of them is making it unlikely that I will play through the entire thing again. There are certain optional parts that you can replay to get, since you are told what you missed, if anything; not where it is, *what* it is. If you find yourself completely stuck, there are walkthroughs in both text and video form found online for free.

The overall length on average is shorter than two hours so you could do this in a single sitting. There is an auto-save function that activates seemingly every single time you make even the slightest bit of progress. It comes without an icon to announce it; perhaps because it is so ubiquitous. This means that you can play for just a few minutes, accomplish something and not have to worry about getting very far. It also makes it easily available even for people who may be recovering from tennis elbow. In fact if you prefer not to play this on the PC, you can actually get it on the app store and get through it on your smartphone on your commute or during breaks or the like. As such you may not want to spend too much on it, though I'm not sure that they've ever asked for an unreasonable amount.

There is a real charm to this. The fact that this was made by an indie developer with a fairly small team does show - not really in a bad way. Wisely, they do not try to do something that they couldn't accomplish. As such, the art style is not going for photo realism. Honestly, certain parts of this would really not work for that. It creates a world not quite our own from the very start. There's lots of live action versions of this sort of thing, and this has much more freedom than those do to experiment and really go for the kinds of things that they really wanted to. This is a passion project, and their love of the craft is ever present. Animations are often sparse, even minimal. There's just enough - you're never confused as to what is going on right in front of you. The crisp sound design fills in the blanks. Its score does great at building mood, whether it's casual, terrifying, or anywhere in between.

There are gross out jokes in this, something that will put some off, and also something I believe is pretty much expected for the sub genre. I'm not aware of any release that doesn't have at least some of that. For sure, you won't want to skip out on attempting something in this just because it's, objectively speaking, quite disgusting. And it makes this clear very early on. As soon as you start going for getting your hands on flesh, it's readily apparent that you're not just going to go to some farm and buy something that's been bred specifically for this purpose. I did not run into any bugs or glitches at all; the presentation is quite professional. You don't need a high-end machine to run this and it can be appreciated even if your sound system is just okay. Frankly, I'm seriously considering recommending this to people in my social circle who basically only ever check emails and such, who never play video games. That's how accessible this is even to complete newbies. It's extremely rare for something to be both that and actually really appealing to those of us who have been doing this sort of thing for three decades.

I recommend this to everyone who enjoys this sort of thing. 8/10.