Servant of the Lake review - "A delightfully odd adventure that mixes the menial with the mad"

• A brilliant point-and-click adventure
• It flits from the mundane to the bizarre expertly
• There are plenty of disgusting moments that somehow avoid being completely grotesque

A few months ago, I wrote about Servant of the Lake's demo, coming away impressed by its quietly odd atmosphere and pixel-hunting-free UI. Now that I've spent time with the full version, it's largely the same, for the most part better and occasionally worse.

For those unfamiliar, Servant of the Lake sees you spending a slightly long weekend working at the Vanderboom estate, catering to the family's every whim, some of which are decidedly odd. You'll find yourself doing menial chores one moment before assisting in bizarre experiments the next. Regardless of the ordinary or weird, though, there's a lot of pointing, clicking, and a whole lot of puzzle-solving to be done. 

I previously praised the puzzles for not being overly difficult in the demo, meaning I could soak up the calmly bizarre atmosphere instead. However, some are more obtuse in the full version, with the difficulty bubbling into frustration. One such example was arranging flowers, and the logic simply wouldn't click with me. Eventually, I solved it entirely by accident, and while Alexandra Vanderboom was pleased with my bouquet skills, I had no clue how we got there. 

That's not a huge knock on Servant of the Lake, though. Different thinkers will succeed and struggle accordingly since there's a good variety on display here. And while I found some of the trickier puzzles a tad nonsensical for my brain's wiring, there's a well-judged mix of straightforward and convoluted that prevents Servant of the Lake from becoming one barrier after another. You'll zip through a few simple conundrums before being confronted with a real thinker. The pace is all the better for it, and it certainly lessens any mounting annoyance. Although a hint system would have gone a long way to eliminating that. 

If you go down to the lake today...

Unlike other point-and-clicks or puzzlers, it wasn't necessarily figuring out solutions that provided the most entertainment. A lot of that came from the set-up. Sometimes, the solution would be simple, yet the execution makes it wonderfully baffling or just downright odd. One part has you shaking a baby in a basket to uncover the code for a suitcase. It was as amusing as it was morally abhorrent, with the infant bawling the entire time. I've committed many crimes in video games over the years (as is the nature of the beast), but this one made me feel the most uncomfortable.

Then it flits to something as menial as grinding coffee beans before ramping up to the bizarre once again. The constant switch from ordinary to low-level strange generates an unusual atmosphere that settles on a borderline charming level of creepy. It's helped by the various characters you meet being completely nonplussed by it. Pulling a maggot from a woman's neck after cutting open her stitches or blood pouring from the ceiling is just another chore. It's absolutely not a sign that something is horrendously wrong with this world. And, weirdly, I found myself buying into it. By the time I had to use a man's own saliva to put out a fire in his mouth by prodding his teeth, it somehow felt normal. Yeah, I'll just sort out this box of fingers and organs. No problem. 

The other strange thing is, as disgusting as all of that sounds, Servant of the Lake manages to swerve away from becoming a gross-out affair, continuing its impressive string of contradictions. I suspect it's the Flash-era style look that prevents this, since nothing's overly detailed, nor does the game revel in the grotesqueness of it all. I won't divulge further details about any of the puzzle setups because most of my enjoyment came from finding out what was next. 

Instead, let's focus on how it plays on mobile. While I played the demo on Steam, I finally got hands-on with the touch screen controls. And, unsurprisingly, it plays remarkably well. As the screen is rarely cluttered, it's nearly impossible to misclick anything, while simple actions like rotating the dials on a code lock feel more tangible than with a mouse, as do tugging ropes to raise a flag or spinning the mechanism on a coffee grinder. 

If, like me, you've never played a Rusty Lake game before, this is absolutely the time to change that. It possesses an incredibly distinct atmosphere that I've not seen in too many places, and the puzzles are great, thematically if not always satisfying. Mobile is also absolutely the place to play it. It feels more tactile, and it's cheaper. A double win, then.