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Underground Blossom, the latest instalment in developer Rusty Lake’s surreal puzzle saga, has a release date: it’ll be careening through the tunnels of time and rolling into a distinctly Steam-shaped station on Wednesday, 27th September.
The Rusty Lake games, if you’re unfamiliar, meld casual point-and-click puzzling with room-escape-style conundrums to tell a deliciously weird, loosely interconnected tale orbiting (to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the title) the lives of the Vanderboom family. The series generally falls into two camps; shorter, free-to-play offerings under the Cube Escape banner, and longer premium offerings that tend to be more substantial and more creatively ambitious.
Underground Blossom – which follows last year’s wonderfully inventive co-operative puzzler The Past Within – falls into the latter camp, this time taking players on a journey, via the Rusty Lake underground system, through the life and memories of Laura Vanderboom, who was introduced all the way back in the series’ first outing, Cube Escape: Seasons.
“Travel from station to station, each metro stop symbolising a piece of Laura’s past and future,” Rusty Lake explained when Underground Blossom was announced earlier this year. “Solve various puzzles, find the correct metro to board and uncover one of Laura’s timelines, while simultaneously helping her make sense of her life and escape the corruption of her mind!”.
Underground Blossom comes to Steam on 27th September, with a demo available now. And if you want to get better acquainted with the history of the Vanderboom family after that, there’s a nine-game Cube Escape bundle on Steam for a very reasonable £4.99, while the considerably chunkier (and very excellent) Rusty Lake bundle – which features the Cube Escape Collection and their six much longer counterparts – costs around £23.
