By way of this game's literal content, here are some trigger warnings. I'm not censoring them because they'll mess up an e-reader. Also, as per the last one, this one meanders, and it gets repetitive. The game is better than my experience.

murder, coprophagia, torture, self-harm
Other general triggers include:
Misinterpreting words, ignoring complaints, an anxiety attack that crept up in text format, friends who don't listen. there are probably more.

Directory:

000 (background info)
--- (General walkthrough of our Deer friend)
=== (general issues and how it affected personal experience)
333 (detailed grievances and personal experience)
444 (Reason for putting this review out here) <-- This actually expands further on detailed grievances and personal experiences

000 (background info)

I have to set some background information up. I am a streamer with a small audience. Most of the time, it's full of lurkers, so I play in textual silence. I stream, not for the same meta others do, but as an interactive medium for some sort of connection with others. I also realize my own general negative disposition.

I had gone two weeks without streaming (my schedule is inconsistent), but within those two weeks, I had been active on Smule, a karaoke app. For those who are curious, the etymology of karaoke is a portmanteau from Japanese, combining kara (空), which means empty, and the first half of orchestra (オーケストラ). I bring this up because despite how detached that sounds, I have been having fun, interacting with others on the app. I know I'm not the best singer—far from it. I'm partly there doing voice acting skits as a hobbyist. I'm also experiencing more interactivity on there than I do streaming video games.

So when I did decide to stream the game, it was partially on a whim. I had already had the game downloaded onto my PC for a while, and I had checked to see on howlongtobeat that it takes around 3-4 hours. That seemed like a reasonable amount to stream. And it was. I knew I'd get sleepy halfway through, and I did. So things had gone predictably.

I had started up playing when I had a fairly newer follower, who I've interacted with before get excited about me starting up this game. They were doing their best not to spoil, though without much interaction prior, I know most people don't quite understand how little talk of the game I mean. But this game by its very nature invites conversation. The game's UI has options to check out other games from the devs, including other games in the series. You can join their Discord server, or even watch Walkthrough videos. By its very design, it elicits a communal discussion centered around it. But. That isn't the kind of interaction I want. I don't expect others to understand this mentality, but it's my preference in a mystery puzzle point and click adventure game that I at least experience this on my own.

--- (General walkthrough of our Deer friend)

I'm going to cover the first night as best as I can from memory. So it's a partial walkthrough.

So yes. Those are the general gameplay and thematic genres. Except, all I'm told as a player is that a bunch of people are joining me on an island with a hotel. The gameplay is split up into nights, and you can choose which hotel patron you can visit for the night. Before doing so, you can also talk to the guests, whose dialog doesn't really change throughout the different nights. I didn't really know what I was doing, but once you choose a potential victim, you have two other optional items you can collect. The UI does give these objectives when talking to the chef. And all of the main objectives involve a form of animal protein. I haven't mentioned it yet, but the characters are all portrayed as anthropomorphic creatures. The guests are what's for dinner.

I thought the game was silly for having access to the dining room, only to be told dinner time is only at night. Apparently, this is still displayed even after you complete your objective, which always takes place at night.

The first victim I chose happened to be the occupant on the first floor in the first room. That's about the first and last time logic really set in concretely. Once you enter a room, attempts to leave will be met with a message in the lines of not being able to leave until you get their meat. I want to say protein. The game doesn't say flesh. Okay, so I'm here to murder someone in a hotel. And it's a puzzle game with point and click adventure controls.

This deer I'm sent to kill makes a stink about me needing to make him a Bloody Mary. The game gives you a recipe to follow. You have vodka, blood, tabasco, and a secret ingredient. Vodka is tucked away in a canteen and the easiest ingredient to get, behind an object. It's not asking for pixel perfection, so that's neat. The second ingredient had me worried so I avoided it while doing everything else I could in the room.

This is where I had collected a screwable jar for a grinder. This jar was the main vessel for everything despite a perfectly good canteen (hip flask) that could have done the trick as well. The canteen took up inventory space once used. The jar on the other hand had about three or more purposes. Early on, you can catch a butterfly with the jar. You use that butterfly to pin it in a lepidoptera display with two other butterflies. You can click them. And. nothing. In another location, they have another lepidoptera display, but they're all shaded out.

Other fixings in the house included mounted skulls of other animals, a chemical lab, and other things. The lab involves several puzzles. One is using a bucket (that you easily find) of water to try and get 8(milliliters?) while only ever pouring from one container to another. Very logically sound. And I had done a similar puzzle in the visual novel iteration of Silent Hill for the Gameboy Advance. Nothing of course is ever told to you, so everything is quite obtuse. I would just stumble onto puzzles and clickables until things worked.

The lab also has weights and a scale. Two of the weights have numbers, and three of them have weights. The numbers are on opposite sides and can only be placed as such. The weights with symbols are a mystery, but you can deduce their value through comparative weighing. The symbols on the weights correspond to the shapes on a safe, so it's a completely logical puzzle with variables for weights that you can solve.

I mentioned tabasco earlier as an ingredient for a Bloody Mary. Well, fortunately, there isn't anything complicated with that one. Find the mounted skull of a deer and click on both sides to make the antlers grow so much, that you can click on the tabasco-dispensing lever. The tabasco comes out the nostril. It's not blood. You collect it with the jar. Yay! You can keep getting more tabasco after you use your tabasco jar in the Bloody Mary cup. There's nothing stopping you! It's only visually disturbing, but overall weird. So that's a curveball compared to the lab. The antler on the left also has a cooking herb, one of the optional ingredients! Thanks. Okay.

That safe I mentioned earlier? It gives you a knife. Cut the deer. You got blood! Yay! I was worried that I might get deer meat this way, but it's not how you get it. So. Yes. You can cut him. But cutting him gives you blood. That you use for the Bloody Mary he demands. Unlike the tabasco, you can't keep cutting him to get more blood.

But there's a secret ingredient? Apparently, vodka, blood, and tabasco are not enough. I tried giving him the concoction early, but the game refused. It became clear that the fourth ingredient was poison. So in order to get the poison, you have to... not collect more butterflies, but follow the shaded lepidoptera case's patterns (left to right, which is assumed) by tapping on the butterflies in the other case. This will inexplicably open up the butterfly you placed in the case, revealing a plant seed. This plant seed goes into what you eventually realize is dirt. Your bucket hopefully has water, and you can water the dirt. Then you click on the seed, which isn't pixel perfect, but still tight, to force grow the flower. It was some sort of bellflower on rows. It could be a nightshade or foxglove, I'm not a botanist. You click it even further for the flowers to wilt. Click it again and you get seeds. Go back to the grinder, reattach the screwable jar, and put the seeds inside the grinder. You have poison powder. Take that poison powder and attach it to the distillation apparatus in the chem lab. Don't forget the water you balanced. Click a few more times to receive poison. Put it into the Bloody Mary. Give it to the deer. Watch him convulse and die. Yay, you got deer meat!

Well, that was an unequal amount of puzzles and time put into this one room. But wait. I only have the main ingredient and one optional ingredient. I missed another one? Turns out I missed the optional ingredient before even going into his room. I was supposed to pick up the phone at the receptionist's desk (which I had done) and click it again to answer. Mind you, I thought I attempted the second click. But behind the phone is the rack of keys (there are no keys, it's a key rack) that takes me into another window. So I thought I couldn't pick up the phone. And that's when I realized.

=== (general issues and how it affected personal experience)

This game autosaves. There are no save slots. If I want that other ingredient, I need to start over from the beginning and do that puzzle process all over again.

And that's when my brain switched from enjoying-to-tolerating an obtuse murdery puzzle game into realizing that this game isn't for me. I wanted to find everything the game was offering. I didn't want to skip things. But worse: If I were to find everything, that would mean never making a mistake. This made me view the game from a fairly free puzzle game into the most linear chore list.

I wanted to know more about this game, whose art intrigued me. I had no way of knowing what the missable content could be if I didn't clear it. I also didn't have enough energy to replay a puzzle game where half the logic it ran on was moon logic. The person I mentioned earlier dropped a line about the guests being cold despite the food I served them earlier (shrimp cocktails). They had also mentioned how this game works fine as a standalone entry.

333 (detailed grievances and personal experience)

So. From my experience, I didn't feel like this game was much of a standalone. It's apparently the first in the franchise, but chronologically third, says a friend. Mechanically, it's supposedly similar to the previous games the devs worked on as well. I went in as blind as I could into a game that had barebones narrative, along with being this surreal mystery. I never learned why I was murdering everyone and feeding them to each other. I could barely infer anything from the characters I was murdering with the puzzle rooms. Half the time, I was solving canonical moon logic puzzles to murder people who, from my understanding, definitely saw me plan the most Rube Golberg machines of death traps. None of the guests seemed to care that the guests' numbers were dwindling. At one point, one of the guests, a literal pig, demanded I make him a sandwich, and I kept feeding him a turd sandwich. The game forced me to do it to progress, this wasn't an optional event. I was purposely being cruel. To get an optional item, the game asks of the player to torture an anthropomorphic bird child (a chick if you will) and electrocute them six times. The child still helps you for some reason for the main story. The game really wanted to make the player feel uncomfortable, while the avatar was just going through the motions. The shock value is strong. But.

I also assumed this was a point-and-click adventure game. It is not. The hotel has little to explore, and every night, you're trapped in a room until you can get out. Point-and-click is its method of gameplay, but there is no adventure. I didn't get to read much, so there wasn't much dialog. My expectations were shaped by that, but I kept playing. I solved puzzles that I thought I could do, but the fear of missing out on extra items for a potentially different ending had me follow a walkthrough after a while. I actually did have to restart my file after the second or third victim. Ironically enough, I would have followed the game's intended route for the secret ending because I still for the most part found different optional items that would lead to the next intended victim. But no. The lack of a manual save was a psychologically crippling affect. It was self-induced pain though.

The reward for playing perfectly was a 4 digit code you can use in the next game. I wasn't enticed to go onto the next game. I wanted to be rewarded for the game I played and owned now. It felt like such a letdown that I put in that work for nothing.

444 (Reason for putting this review out here)

The main reason why I was inspired to write this review is not about the game itself though. Despite how much I wrote, I wouldn't have written it had it not been my interaction with another friend. And this may or may not be relatable, but it sure stoked a fire in me. They had also popped into my stream and saw I wasn't having as much fun with the game. I was in their stream, and they asked me how it went afterwards. I had told them how I approached the game, and how someone else said it was a standalone. But. They kept relating it to their experience and how I'm viewing the game wrong. And it felt like I was having my experience invalidated. And every time they'd say something, I'd say how things felt to me. And how the experience wasn't to my liking. And they were going on and on about how there weren't achievements at the time, but they still did secret items. My mindset wasn't on the achievements themselves, but literally the same items. There weren't any achievements separate from the 100% run. The ones I missed are ones the game just didn't read up on. But because the game is part of this greater mystery franchise, they didn't want to go in depth because they didn't want to ruin the experience for others.

Except, the way they kept talking down about my opinion while trying to make it seem like I was "hyperfocused on a specific angle that wasn't there" felt like I wasn't being heard. The game literally only has an autosave. No matter how short a game, a click and point puzzle game with multiple approaches to its gameplay should have saves. That's just a whole quality of life option games need. That was honestly my biggest gripe, because it affected how I played and viewed the game. The irony is that now I have someone telling me that I'm hyper-focused on an angle about how this game with barebones storytelling is actually the most standalone game in the franchise. You know how much that doesn't make me want to check out the franchise? It literally makes it sound like the games only get more obtuse and the story that's present gets worse. But the games have an interconnected story. The gameplay apparently doesn't transfer over to the next game. But that doesn't change my mind on this game's experience. The only thing that gets solved is that I murdered a bunch of people in this game who frankly didn't really seem to care all that much. And I did it in the most convoluted ways. If it's not for me, it's not for me. If I didn't enjoy the experience and I don't think that the game felt like a game that could stand on its own, then I didn't enjoy it. I don't usually play these types of games. This is something that this friend should have realized.

Puzzle games in general are inherently niche. Anything making you wrack your brain around something is only for those who want to stimulate their brain this way. They're a difficult genre to get into, because you're finding a balance between your understanding and the player's understanding. And you as the developer always have the answer. Making that "aha!" moment isn't easy. Puzzle games with moon logic are inherently unsatisfying because it inevitably turns into brute forcing a puzzle. Some of the game's logic also involves clicking more than once and hoping you you notice an animation change of significant value. But this particular game doesn't have pure moon logic. I explained how the lab portion of the game has pure logic. You can still brute force the water pouring puzzle, but that's easier to zone out to.

I still think the game has amazing art. I like its aesthetic. But the lack of a manual save option is terrible. The reward for fully completing the game is terrible and rewards you only if you play the next game (and fairly immediately so you can use that code as soon as possible). Half the menu UI literally wants you to see other games and explore their community. None of that feels like a stand-alone self-contained story.

My friend wanted to compare my issues with its story to a Rubik's Cube. And how I shouldn't expect a story from that. But I wasn't playing a Rubik's Cube. I wasn't playing Chess. I wasn't playing Life. Rusty Lake Hotel has its own setting and story and greater 'verse. It's not the same as changing up Rubik's Cubes or Chess boards. Although obtuse, the game has a narrative. And then it kept telling me to play more. My shitty comparison was to Kingdom Hearts. And I personally hate how much people use Kingdom Hearts as an example of a franchise that's confusing and convoluted. The first game they released is still fairly coherent. That's a game that has needless complication in its narrative, but the first game has beat after beat after beat that still work for its narrative. RLH was me murdering people as an excuse to play puzzles. *I understood that part. But you can't tell me a narrative wasn't being told or that I'm focusing on that aspect too much when that's part of the meta-appeal of the game. It's a surreal mystery that begs discussion. The same friend then went and compared it to The Room games. I haven't played them. I've seen others play them. But you know what was nice about what I'd seen from when people played The Room? For the most part, different puzzles were self-contained! Different puzzles were in their own zone. The narrative is in the background, and puzzles are the main focus. Those puzzles aren't asking you to figure out that the butterfly outside is a collectible, and that you need a jar to collect grounds from a grinder (not the canteen, not the bucket) to catch it so you can pin it, touch other insects to reveal a poisonous seed, grow a seed into a flower, and get those flowers' seeds to then put into a grinder to use the powder you receive to distillate it. There were several puzzles involved in that action. None of that was communicated with the player. I didn't know that I was looking at dirt in the lab area, and didn't understand why it was in a glass dome like in Beauty and the Beast. That information is intentionally not conveyed to the player, so you don't necessarily know what uses they could have. Sorry, why couldn't I even turn the original seed into a powder? Why did I have to grow a whole plant for this?

I wasn't heated about the game. I just thought it wasn't for me. But after being told "I'm detecting some salt", THAT is the fucking salt. I hate not being able to convey an opinion THAT WAS ASKED OF ME without being told I'm fucking experiencing it wrong. How the hell is this okay?

Gmers on here. You're allowed to have your own opinion. And your experiences are yours. I'm so tired, even jokingly, of people saying "Everyone has the right to their own opinion, even if it's wrong, har har" because NO YOU JUDGEMENTAL PRICK. If it's an opinion, it's an opinion. If it's how someone experiences something, that's how they experience something. Doubling down and then dismissing legitimate grievances and having the audacity to say someone is being salty is actually abhorrent. You don't get to act like everything is fine with a game with this many flaws despite their dev-intended designs. I hate how insular this hobby is. I hate how I'd rather connect with people, but people would rather be smug about their knowledge. I hate that this isn't a review, but a rant that's only tangentially related to the game. I may have streamed, but I only got people who played the game before. And in a puzzle game (I will not call horror a gameplay genre when that's atmospheric and thematic) that had its own story, I'm not interested in playing more. I'm even more uninterested when the fans of these types of games and genres think their experiences AND LITERAL FUTURE GAMES IN THE FRANCHISE can change my other gripe of the game. Of not being a stand-alone game. You know the game has a goose that makes you take her pictures, and eventually she asks you to take a picture of her shooting herself dead? I didn't even kill her that time. It was a convoluted series of puzzles for a suicide. WHY?? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?? It's not a cliffhanger, but it sure feels like one. It's more like I landed into a cliffhanger of a "game". That's not a stand-alone if you're in the thick of it.