The Past Within

Rusty Lake has been quietly building a universe of bizarre, interconnected puzzle games for years, cultivating a dedicated following that thrives on its signature blend of unsettling atmosphere and cryptic storytelling. With The Past Within, released November 2, 2022, the studio took its boldest step yet, graduating from a solo affair to a mandatory cooperative venture. This isn’t a game with a co-op mode; the cooperation is the game. The premise is simple: two players are separated by time itself. One exists in a two-dimensional past (1926), rendered in the familiar Rusty Lake escape-room style. The other inhabits a three-dimensional future (1984), navigating a small, sterile room. Both players see different clues, different mechanisms, and different pieces of a central puzzle box. They share one goal: to unravel the grim machinations of Albert Vanderboom.

The game deliberately omits any in-game communication tool. Players are expected to talk, to describe what they see, out loud, over a phone call or a Discord channel. This single design constraint is the source of all the game’s friction and much of its appeal. It strips away the shared visual language taken for granted in cooperative games and forces players to invent their own. How do you describe an abstract symbol to someone who can’t see it? How do you guide them through a sequence of actions when your perspectives are fundamentally alien to one another? The Past Within isn’t about reflexes or strategy in the traditional sense. It’s an exercise in empathy, patience, and linguistic precision, wrapped in a wonderfully creepy narrative package that feels like a forgotten David Lynch short film. It is an audacious, and largely successful, bet on the idea that the most interesting puzzles are the ones we solve between people, not just on a screen.

• Asymmetrical Timelines: The core mechanic. One player is in a 2D past, the other in a 3D future. Neither can solve the puzzles without verbal input from the other.
• Communication-Based Puzzles: Every puzzle is a knowledge gap. One player has the question, the other has the answer. The gameplay loop is one of observation, description, and execution based entirely on trust.
• The Vanderboom Mystery: The game advances the overarching narrative of the Rusty Lake universe, focusing on the dark legacy of the Vanderboom family. It’s a surreal, often disturbing story told through environmental clues and shared discovery.

The entire structure of The Past Within hinges on a single, powerful concept: the communication imperative. In most co-op games, from It Takes Two to a Destiny raid, players share a world. They can point, shoot, and gesture within a common digital space. Rusty Lake strips this away completely. The screen is no longer a window into a shared reality, but a private, incomplete view. This forces a fascinating regression to the most basic form of cooperation: speech.

The Gameplay Loop as a Language Game

The moment-to-moment gameplay is a cycle of description. “I have a box with three dials,” one player might say. “The first has symbols: a bird, a fish, a skull.” The other replies, “Okay, on the wall in my room, there’s a plaque with a sequence: fish, fish, skull, bird.” It sounds simple, but the design is built to complicate this exchange. The symbols become more abstract, the sequences more convoluted. Players are forced to develop a private lexicon. That “weird squiggle” or “the pointy thing that looks like a ‘K’” becomes a crucial piece of shared data. This is where the design shines. The game facilitates moments of pure collaborative breakthrough—the “Aha!” that erupts when two seemingly unrelated pieces of information click into place across decades. It also creates moments of intense, though ultimately rewarding, frustration when that shared language breaks down.

Narrative Through a Broken Mirror

The narrative, centered on the life and death of Albert Vanderboom, is pieced together like shrapnel. One player might find a key, while the other finds the lock it belongs to, but fifty-eight years in the future. Players are collectively reconstructing a memory through the puzzles they solve. Because the discoveries are bifurcated, each player holds a vital secret. This makes the eventual reveal—and there are several signature Rusty Lake twists—feel earned in a way a solo experience could not replicate. Players didn’t just find the answer; they built it out of whispered descriptions and shared trust. However, the experience is intensely linear and offers zero replayability. Once the mystery is solved, it’s solved for good.

The primary and most valid criticism is the game’s brevity. A focused duo can tear through the entire story in about two hours. While that time is dense with clever design, it feels more like a strong proof-of-concept than a fully fleshed-out product.

Rusty Lake’s art style has always been a core part of its identity, and The Past Within is no exception. It’s a world of stark lines, muted colors, and surreal imagery that feels hand-drawn and deeply unsettling. The 2D world of 1926 is classic escape-room fare, but the 3D environment of 1984 is new territory for the developer. It’s simple, almost sterile, but effectively renders the puzzle box at its center as a tangible, interactive object. The sound design is minimalist and creepy, punctuated by a narrator whose gravelly voice adds a layer of dread to the proceedings. As a 2D-driven game of modest scope, it is light on hardware demands, and the aesthetic is not about photorealism but about mood — in that, it succeeds.

The choice of platform has a meaningful impact on the experience, primarily due to the communication requirement.

• Steam (PC/Mac): Arguably the ideal way to play. Mouse control suits the point-and-click puzzles, and running a Discord or FaceTime call on a second monitor or phone is a natural, low-friction workflow for most PC gamers.
• Android/iOS: The touch interface is intuitive and well suited to the puzzles. The main friction point is the social layer. Juggling a phone call and the game on a single device can be clumsy. The best experience on mobile involves two people in the same room on their own devices, or using a separate device for the voice call.
• Nintendo Switch: The Switch presents the most friction. The touch controls in handheld mode are well implemented, but the console has no native voice chat solution for a game like this. Players are forced to use the Switch Online mobile app or, more realistically, coordinate a separate phone call. It works, but it feels like a workaround for a platform-level deficiency.

The Past Within is a strong piece of conceptual design. Rusty Lake took a significant risk by building a game that is, by its very nature, unplayable solo and fundamentally dependent on external tools to function. The risk largely pays off. It’s a distinctive cooperative experience that creates genuine moments of human connection through its clever, asymmetrical puzzles. At $5.99, the short length stings less than it might, but it remains a significant drawback, and the reliance on a committed partner limits who can get the most out of it. We recommend it to duos hungry for something different; for everyone else, it’s a solid but narrow curiosity. It’s less of a game and more of a two-hour event — an unsettling one that lingers.