Room Escape Artist

Rusty Lake Untold: The Lab is a print-and-play escape game created by Rusty Lake.

Format

Style of Play:

• Print-and-play
• Tabletop/ audio escape game

Who is it For?

• Any experience level to play
• Any experience level to gamemaster, but experience DMing RPGs helps
• Puzzle-curious RPG fans
• Rusty Lake fans
• Fans of Escape this Podcast

Required Equipment: printer, pen and paper, scissors… and a gamemaster.

It’s a pen-and-paper adventure. You can download this game for free on their website after signing up with an email account. You can either print out the game materials or use the files on your PC to play digitally (on video chat, for example). But regardless, a pen and paper to take notes is vital.

One person needs to volunteer as a gamemaster and needs to prepare the game.

Recommended Team Size: 1 gamemaster and 1-2 players

Play Time: about 20 minutes to prepare the game and 60 minutes to play

Price: We played the free early-access version.

Booking: download and play at your leisure

Description

Your gamemaster shows you a series of pictures of the game setting and you must explore by asking questions and interacting with the environment. The gamemaster tells you when you do something correctly and then provides you with narration to move you forward.

For the gamemaster, there are some pretty detailed instructions on how to run a pen-and-paper adventure for folks who’ve never done that before, as well as detailed descriptions of what to say or give to the players when they tell you what action they want to try.

Matthew Stein’s Reaction

Rusty Lake Untold: The Lab was a cross between a one-shot TTRPG and a point-and-click escape game, or put otherwise, it was an audio escape room which players can gamemaster for each other.

As Rusty Lake dipped their toes into this new medium, they played it safe, creating an experience that was smooth, tight, and polished, yet not as stylistically or structurally adventurous as I’d expect from a typical Rusty Lake title. Namely, there was a missed opportunity to take advantage of settings and interactions that could exist uniquely in a world constructed in the players’ collective imagination. As Rusty Lake continues to explore this format, I’d love to see more layered puzzles, memorable characters to interact with, and a stronger connection to Rusty Lake’s iconic macabre weirdness.

I played Rusty Lake Untold: The Lab remotely, and Christina (read her review below) generously facilitated the game for me via Roll20.net. While this approach actually worked well, I’m not sure that the setup time required to configure the game in advance was proportionate to the play time. Given that the gameplay is quite linear and simple, I’d recommend playing The Lab in-person with printed materials, with a single facilitator and a single player.

Christina Rohlf’s Reaction

Rusty Lake Untold: The Lab was the first free installation of tabletop Rusty Lake adventure games. The game required at least one player to serve as the gamemaster to lead the experience. I played alone with my husband and he took on the role of the gamemaster (before I later acted as gamemaster for Matthew, whose review is above). I found the game to be extremely easy. The few puzzles in the game were light and most of the gameplay was spent interacting with and combining objects. The gamemaster preparation is relatively minor if playing in person, but more preparation is required when playing with other individuals online as the materials aren’t readily situated for screen sharing. In general, the game attempted to directly convert from the Rusty Lake mobile game format to a tabletop game. While this made the game recognizable as part of the Rusty Lake series, I believe the game would have been better executed remaining in the mobile format.

Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction

Waking up in an unidentifiable lab with some serious asylum vibes, you try to recollect your memory and get out of there asap.

At its best, whoever takes on the role of the storyteller has everything they need to know explained in great detail in a PDF guide. The puzzles are all logical and not too hard. I especially liked how the ending tied back to the beginning. And have I mentioned that it’s completely free to play?!

At its worst, the format needs someone to volunteer as a gamemaster and therefore forfeit their right to puzzle along. Yet again my grief with the plot is that it’s vague and doesn’t really go anywhere, which is not the first time I felt this way about Rusty Lake games.

I want to applaud the developer team for taking on a new game genre and testing the waters pretty successfully with this early access trial. I’m looking forward to a fully fleshed-out version of this.

Fro’s Reaction

I was thrilled to see Rusty Lake expand their offerings to include a tabletop product. The Lab was the first of its type in their catalogue and free to access (a second, premium adventure in the same style is expected to launch soon). The experience required a gamemaster, and Rusty Lake provided well-written instructions for those wishing to play this role. Players looking for a gamemaster can check the Rusty Lake Discord channel. Sourcing a gamemaster online inherently leaves some variability in the quality of the experience, and I was fortunate enough to have an outstanding, knowledgeable and funny gamemaster run my session.

Gameplay unfolded through a series of narration and illustrations provided by the gamemaster and I really had to use my imagination and ask a lot of questions to visualize the space, The visuals, which had a distinct Rusty Lake feel, guided the exploration yet left a lot of room for imagination. I would have loved to have seen a few pops of color and some of the more visceral components that are unique to Rusty Lake, and I hope to see them in the premium version.

Overall, I really enjoyed this experience and I’m excited to see more in this format. If you’re thinking of playing The Lab, I suggest you play the catalogue of Rusty Lake point-and-click games first: A) so you can get acquainted with the quirky Rusty Lake world and storyline and B) because they are great and you should play them.