Servant of the Lake: Rusty Lake Returns to Their Roots!

“What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?” – Jane Austen

Overview

Servant of the Lake is the latest game from Rusty Lake, creators of puzzle games such as Rusty Lake Paradise and Underground Blossom. Players take on the role of servant at the Vanderboom mansion, but it soon becomes clear there is something sinister going on.

Narrative

Players begin by travelling by carriage to the Vanderboom estate, which sits near the famous Rusty Lake. The year is 1839, and for three days and three nights, they must play servant to siblings Aldous, William, and Alexandra with the help of an experienced maid. Things seem straightforward at first, but it is not long before the new servant is tasked with some unusual errands, unwittingly caught up in a three-way game of underhanded and somewhat sinister sibling rivalry and dabbling in the occult. The narrative is told largely through the dialogue, as well as via the gameplay itself with lots of nods and tie-ins to the earlier games set in the same world.

Gameplay

Servant of the Lake is, like the others in the series, a point-and-click puzzle game. Players can navigate left and right and back and forth between rooms, collecting items in their inventory in order to solve a varied collection of puzzles often relating to household tasks or to other jobs assigned to the new servant, such as preparing breakfast, repairing furniture, or checking the hallways at night. The three days over which the game takes place are divided into morning, afternoon, and evening, and then further divided into tasks, which provides an increased sense of progression.

The conundrums include inventory-based puzzles (finding a required object such as a key), jigsaws (mending a broken cup, for example), as well as numerical, logic-based, and visual puzzles, to name a few. There is very little repetition in the style of puzzles, and they are just tricky enough to be satisfying without causing frustration. This keeps the gameplay fresh and interesting throughout whilst maintaining the reassuring familiarity for players of previous game sand fans of the series.

New for this instalment of the Rusty Lake series is a servant’s notebook. The player can access this at any time to see a list of the daily tasks, re-read any found documents, make notes or drawings, as well as check if achievements have been found for each task; if not, each task can be revisited after the game has been completed without resetting overall progress.

Styling

Rusty Lake games have an instantly recognisable art style, and Servant of the Lake is no exception, with its stylised and minimal cartoon visuals making use of the signature bold outlines and solid colours in a heavily muted palette that contrast with the more artistic style of things such as the view from the house, or the paintings on the walls.

The music ranges from melancholy but relaxing to unquestionably ominous, making use of piano, flute, harp, and vocals and slow to moderate tempos. As always with Rusty Lake games, the soundtrack is very well suited to the narrative and the style of gameplay. The ambient sound effects such as birds, wind, creaking, and trees rustling give life to the environment and help immerse the player more completely in the experience. Servant of the Lake also includes some quality voice acting, with a selection of monotone, drawling, nervous, and uptight voices that really convey each character’s personality, but also the overall tone of the game and its narrative.

Summary

Servant of the Lake is another brilliant game from Rusty Lake. It offers an engaging narrative, satisfying puzzles, eclectic characters, eerie audio, and wonderfully stylised visuals. All things veterans of the series will have come to expect. It will take around 4-6 hours to complete and has a very reasonable price point. Fans of the series should absolutely play this new title, but anyone who enjoys a morbid narrative or point-and-click puzzles should give it a go too. I’d recommend this game to almost anyone!

Looking for more point-and-click puzzle games? You may also like these reviews:
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