Rusty Lake

Cube Escape: Arles is a puzzle solving game in the Cube Escape series. Art buffs in particular might find this entry exciting, since you play as Vincent van Gogh in his bedroom in Arles. You have to collect various objects and use them to solve puzzles in order to try to get out of the room.

One content warning that also counts as a spoiler, sort of: at one point in the game van Gogh must cut off his own ear. There’s no emotion that goes with this - it’s just something he does, and he doesn’t seem particularly concerned about it after the act is completed.

As far as I can tell, the only way this relates to the other games is that Laura had a print of this particular painting in her home in Cube Escape: Case 23. It doesn’t seem to add much to the overall Rusty Lake story, beyond providing another confirmation that mental illness is likely the start of the creation of corrupted souls. I do hope that one of the later Cube Escape games demonstrates that there’s a way to purify (?) corrupted souls, because otherwise this series appears to be making a pretty bleak statement about mental illness.

I turned to a walkthrough for guidance a couple times while playing this, but for the most part this was another game in the series that I was able to play through on my own. Much of the game involved collecting various items and using them in different places in the room, and I don’t recall any puzzles that particularly stood out for me or that I particularly liked. I did enjoy the slightly creepy feeling that the “alternate” room inspired, though, and the painting puzzle was nice.

Overall, this doesn’t really add anything to the larger Rusty Lake story, but it’s a decent puzzle game with an interesting setup. It would probably make for a good first Cube Escape game for those who haven’t tried the series before.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (meer)

Like all the other Cube Escape games, this one can be downloaded for free. I’d recommend playing some of the other entries in the series before this one - at least Cube Escape: Seasons - because otherwise it’ll probably come across as extremely random.

Anyway, in this game you play as Harvey the parrot. If you’ve played the other games, you know that Laura is going to Rusty Lake Mental Health and Fishing. For some reason she decided that the best way to transport her parrot was to stick him in a box with some of her other belongings. Your job is to complete a few puzzles in order to find a way out of the box.

Although it didn’t add much to the overall Rusty Lake story, this was still a nice little game. The puzzles were just difficult enough to be interesting, but not so difficult that they frustrated me and drove me to check a walkthrough (and I have a pretty low frustration threshold when it comes to puzzle games, anymore). My absolute favorite puzzle was probably the fly and maggot one. It took me a beat to figure out what I was supposed to do, but then going through line by line and thinking through the logic turned out to be extremely satisfying.

I wouldn’t recommend this as anyone’s first Cube Escape game, and it’s not terribly interesting story-wise, but it’s a nice little entry if you just want spend some time solving puzzles.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (meer)

In Cube Escape: Theatre, Dale Vandermeer is back and exploring more of his memories while in the endless elevator. This time he travels to 1971 and an event surreal enough that it (maybe) never happened. Dale finds himself at a theater with a bartender and a depressed man who wants to get drunk enough to drown out the past. Unfortunately for him, in the Cube Escape games “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

This game had lots of crossover with other Cube Escape/Rusty Lake games, especially Rusty Lake Hotel (Ms. Pheasant makes an appearance in human form!), Cube Escape: The Lake, Cube Escape: Seasons, and Cube Escape: Case 23. Part of me thinks it would be best to play this after playing all those other games, and part of me thinks that playing this one first might add a bit more weight to the other games. Cube Escape: The Lake now seems a bit less random to me, for instance.

This was one of the few games in this series that I had the patience to go through without a walkthrough. Well, almost: I broke down and consulted one after spending several fruitless minutes searching for a cube that turned out not to exist. I really enjoyed the various stage puzzles, even though it took me longer to catch on to what was going on with some of them than it probably should have. I wasn’t a huge fan of the “hunt for cubes inside the man’s head” bit (gross), but the part with him in the bathroom at the end was wonderfully creepy.

All in all, this was an excellent entry in the series, both from a puzzle-solving perspective and from a story perspective.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (meer)

In Cube Escape: Seasons, you explore your memories of four different time periods: Spring 1964, Summer 1971, Fall 1971, and Winter 1981. Spring 1964 is a good time. There are indications that things aren’t quite perfect (you’re on Prozac and have a note about something called Rusty Lake Mental Health & Fishing on your bulletin board), but life is decent. Things take a turn for the worse in Summer 1971, and everything is well and truly bad by Fall 1971. It appears that you may be a murderer. But wait! You may be able to go back in time and stop your terrible actions from happening!

I wasn’t fond of this game, at first. It seemed to be using mental illness as ham-handed shorthand for “disturbed future killer,” and I didn’t have much sympathy for the protagonist, who didn’t seem inclined to do much to prevent their actions until after they’d already done something terrible and (in a normal world) irrevocable.

I liked the game a lot more once the time travel aspect became a thing. I’m still a bit confused about what, exactly, happened, but I loved how the phrases from the weird person (?) over the phone became more than just random strange messages. “Everything you touch you change” indeed. Warning: my review includes spoilers from here on out.

Was the protagonist really the blonde woman all along, desperately trying to stop herself from killing herself? And was the blonde woman the same one from Cube Escape: The Mill and Cube Escape: Case 23? It seems like it, but if that’s the case, then I’m confused about the Cube Escape timeline. The blonde woman (or her killer, if they were truly separate people) saved herself in Cube Escape: Seasons, which should have meant that the events of The Mill and Case 23 never happened. The overall Rusty Lake story is compelling, but I’m not sure how everything adds up.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)… (meer)