“Rusty Lake Hotel” jumped out to me from the moment I saw its odd and charming character design. I wasn’t terribly sure what to expect, given that it was tagged on Steam as both a horror game and a point-and-click game. I could not imagine a cartoony point-and-click game really maintaining a solid horror atmosphere. So let’s look at how “Rusty Lake Hotel” tries to balance those elements.
In “Rusty Lake Hotel” the player takes the role of an employee at the titular hotel, currently playing host to five anthropomorphic animals. Over the course of five nights, the player is to gather ingredients with which to make five dinners. The catch is that the central ingredient of each dish is the flesh (or meat, since they are animals) of one of the guests present at the hotel. So the player’s job then is really to kill the guests. However, this is all accomplished through elaborate Rube Goldberg set ups, leaving it more akin to “Final Destination” rather than something like “Motel Hell.”
“Rusty Lake Hotel” has a very distinctive visual feel to it. Things look old fashioned without necessarily looking like they belong to a certain era or art style. This is perhaps the game’s greatest strength because it helps to create an atmosphere where things feel eerie and out of place without necessarily having a single source. The particular way in which the animals are anthropomorphic is rather striking as well; they are not cartoony at all, but rather realistic drawings of animal heads stuck onto generic humanoid bodies. The use of a muted color palette throughout is an interesting choice given the gruesome nature of the game, but one that definitely pays off as it helps to create a sort of distance between the player and the blood and violence that they create.
The sound design in “Rusty Lake Hotel” leaves a bit to be desired. While the visual elements of the game manage to rise above its nature as a simple flash game, the audio never really does. It’s not that the music is bad at all, it’s just that there’s really not very much of it and what there is never rises above being decent background noise. The sound effects are very primitive and after a while some of them (particularly the animal noises) were a little grating. It’s serviceable, but definitely pales in comparison to the impressive visual element. There’s also a bit of voice-acting, but the less said about that the better.
The gameplay left me desperately disappointed. “Rusty Lake Hotel” is, after all, a point-and-click game. You simply click on an object to interact with it, and try to solve puzzles like that. There’s not a whole lot of depth to it. Many of the puzzles don’t seem to make much logical sense, and even if you have the means to kill the guest directly, one has to go through the proper contrived set up that the game wants from you. As for the horror elements of the game, they are mostly relegated to the background. The puzzles tend to undercut the tension necessary for a properly creepy atmosphere. There are some wonderfully horrific ideas in play in “Rusty Lake Hotel,” like the cannibalism and the scenes left by the murders, but the game doesn’t seem to want to focus on these at all, instead opting for a variety of rather generic point-and-click style puzzles.
I really wanted to like “Rusty Lake Hotel,” but I didn’t. It’s all style and absolutely no substance. There is essentially no replay value, either. Basically “Rusty Lake Hotel” is a really nice idea, but it’s not worth actually spending your money on it. There’s just not enough there to justify even it’s small price tag.
