Rusty Lake celebrates 10 years of strangeness with a free game, a new game announcement, a short film, and a big sale

Rusty Lake is celebrating 10 years of creepy weirdness with a free new game, The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, along with an appropriately weird short film and announcement of a brand new premium game called Servant of the Lake.

I’ve been a fan of the Rusty Lake series since Rusty Lake Hotel, a deliciously bizarre puzzle adventure about a group of sharply dressed animals at a swanky dinner party. More strangeness followed in Rusty Lake Roots, Rusty Lake Paradise, The White Door, The Past Within, and Underground Blossom, each of them filled with unexpected twists, secrets, and a deeply grim lore. Despite their strange, surreal nature, Rusty Lake games regularly draw thousands of players and enviable user reviews on Steam.

The new game, The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show, is a bit more straightforward than most of the other games in the series, at least on the surface, but it still goes to some unexpected places, which I will not spoil here. The majority of the puzzles are quite simple, but there are a few that tested me: A music puzzle near the end of the magic show had me absolutely baffled until, after about 15 minutes of trying (and failing) to brute-force it, I realized what I was looking at, and the pieces fell into place.

The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show is free, although if you’re a big fan you can pick up the “supporter pack” for $3. It’s got some wallpapers, in-game cosmetics, and “a heartfelt thank-you letter from the Rusty Lake team,” but nothing in the way of extra puzzles, secrets or achievements: “Getting this DLC is primarily a way to show your support for Rusty Lake,” the team said.

The Intern, the 10th anniversary short film, is less creeptastically bleak than I expected, but it does make for a fun look behind the scenes at Rusty Lake—especially after you’ve played The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show.

The other big news out of today’s anniversary celebration is Servant of the Lake, a new game in the series that promises “a classic single-player Rusty Lake point-and-click adventure,” this one set in the infamous Vanderboom house decades before the events of Rusty Lake Roots.

As the housekeeper of the Vanderboom estate, you’ll explore each room of the house while fulfilling your duties, which will range from “simple tasks such as straightening the portraits and doing the laundry to assisting in complex experiments and cleaning up the aftermath.”

Yeah, that sounds like Rusty Lake, alright. Looks like it, too.

If you haven’t yet sampled the bizarre delights of Rusty Lake, there’s one more bit of good news: The entire series, including the Cube Escape games that started it all, is on sale on Steam and Itch.io for 66% off. Just in case I left any doubt, yes, I recommend them all.