Rusty Lake’s Sinister Puzzles Go Co-op! 或者 The Past Within: Sinister Co-op Puzzling 或者 Rusty Lake’s Co-op Puzzle Adventure

Developer Rusty Lake has unveiled a first – and, it must be admitted, somewhat unsettling – glimpse of its brand-new cooperative time-travel puzzle game The Past Within, the latest addition to its outstanding Rusty Lake and Cube Escape series.

If you haven’t yet savored Rusty Lake’s delightfully surreal creations – a collection of, thus far, 15 games, all presenting a darkly atmospheric slice of casual point-and-click puzzling with a room escape twist – they are truly worth exploring.

Six of its titles are fully-fledged premium offerings (Rusty Lake Hotel, Roots, Paradise, Paradox, The White Door, and the series precursor Samsara Room), while the remainder are smaller companion pieces under the Cube Escape banner. Perhaps most captivatingly, all form one colossal interconnected narrative that is a puzzle in itself to assemble, filled with strange beings from other realms, secret pacts, dark family legacies, ritualistic murders, and more.

And if your curiosity is aroused, and you’re seeking a great starting point, I wholeheartedly recommend Rusty Lake: Roots – a magnificent, surprisingly impactful work, and a splendid example of Developer Rusty Lake’s increasingly ambitious scope.

All of this leads us back to The Past Within, which was initially announced at the beginning of this year. Previously, we were informed that it would take the familiar Rusty Lake formula and introduce a cooperative multiplayer element, where two players collaborate across different timelines to solve the mysteries surrounding the recurring series character Albert Vanderboom. “Communicate what you observe around you to assist each other in solving various puzzles,” the developer explained at that time, “and explore the worlds from distinct perspectives”.

And now we have a much more distinct understanding of how all this will unfold thanks to The Past Within’s first gameplay trailer (above), which hints at a few examples of the game’s cooperative puzzling before things take a slightly ominous turn.