Released in 2015, Rusty Lake Hotel is a mildly surreal puzzle adventure. A rabbit, a wild boar, a pigeon, a pheasant, and a deer arrive at a hotel located on an island, staffed by similarly animal-like personnel. The player’s task is to gather the ingredients for the dinner served at the hotel each day. Every evening, the game closes in escape-room fashion inside the room of a single hotel guest, where mechanistic puzzles are solved. These puzzles form a chain of events whose macabre climax is the acquisition of meat. Mysterious, off-kilter, and at the same time clever, Rusty Lake Hotel tickled my brain pleasantly for a couple of hours, even if completing the game fully almost turned into a painful obsession.

Game by: Rusty Lake