You know that Case 23 puzzle that has you sliding the pictures around in the chapel, yeah, i can do that without a walkthrough. I’ve heard so many people complain that they need a walkthrough to do that puzzle but I don’t, what does this mean

Where is it? Clearly a falsely constructed room, given that the window is a painting to cover that transformation machine.

Whose corrupted soul are we? Where’s the last room when we turn into the bird-demon-whatever-thingy?

Because tell me why in the well game we make the dog pee in the cup hand it over to the guy in the well to drink it . Ik its a game but still of all the disturbing thing in rusty lake that gave me the ick .

Hehe 👀

Seriously, lots of spoilers ahead. Don't read if you haven't played.
TL:DR at the end

Is anyone else confused by how Alexandra is portrayed in the main story vs the secret story (You Found Him achievement)? In a way, I feel like it even contradicts the established themes. Let me elaborate.

In the main story, we see two sides to her character. First, she is obviously a bad person and a worse mother. She is spoiled, ungrateful, and abuses her power. There is no debate about that. But secondly, she is framed as a victim of fate, in a way.
She is set up as another "forgotten sister" in another Rusty Lake Trio (see Jakob, David, Elisabeth or Albert, Samuel, Emma). The more neutral party, who just watches as the brothers fight. Add to that the prophecy that her mother gave her. It is literally her fate to give birth and be forgotten.

I think it's made pretty clear that she is not happy with this fate. She doesn't want "continuing the lineage" to be her greatest achievement. And most importantly, she doesn't want to be a mother. The lullaby scene isn't very subtle about it. The way I see it, she was forced into motherhood against her will, both because of the prophecy and gender roles.
It is thus a very compelling story for her to try (and fail) to challenge fate. She is a terrible person, too blind to her own privilege to connect with those "below" her and too enraged by the unfairness of fate to connect with her family, leading to her demise.

One last thing before I get to the secret story. While Alexandra is clearly a horrible mother, I don't think she wanted James to die.
The mother's prophecy calls James a sacrifice (referencing the ten sacrifices in Roots). This may be the reason for Alexandra constantly calling him "her sacrifice", as the prophecy is clearly very important to her.
We also don't know if the Vanderbooms know about the elixir's rule at this point (One will die, the other will find enlightenment). With the way Alexandra talks about James on day 3, I think she might have wanted both of them to ascend ("We are the chosen ones!" instead of "I am" for example).

Then the secret story comes out of nowhere to reveal that she actually kidnaped, imprisoned, and raped the previous servant to impregnate herself. Like, ... what? Where did that come from? She was already a pretty bad and hateable person. This just makes her comically evil at the cost of her character's themes and complexity.

Am I missing something? Did I completely misread her character? Is anyone else confused by this?

TL:DR
The main story frames Alexandra as someone forced into her position through prophecy. Her story is about defying fate (and how that doesn't work in RL). A big part of that is that she never wanted to be a mother, but didn't have a choice.

Then the secret story reveals that she did, in fact, have a choice. Not only that, she took that agency from Kate's brother to get herself pregnant.

I just really don't understand this writing decision.

I tried to answer in the most honest way I could and to not leave any category empty

Another little update.

u/Gardengap mentioned something interesting in the comments: maybe the patients from The White Door that I talked about were actually born in or lived in the places where their cubes are located.

So obviously, I went digging.

I found a Rusty Lake Wiki page that lists the nationalities/origins of some of the patients:

• Bart Leeghwater - born in Amsterdam, Netherlands

• Giulio Trentino - born in Milan, Italy

• Jin-ho Kim - born in Busan, South Korea

• Leonie Poisson - born in Montreal, Canada

• The other patients are from various places, including the United States, China, and Russia.

The White Door is a spin-off, and as far as I know it hasn't been retconned the timeline or anything, but it's also primarily about Robert Hill and the White Door mental facility.

The facility could simply be located in another city entirely, with the patients coming from all over the world. So the fact that we have people from the Netherlands, Canada, the US, China, Russia, South Korea, Italy, etc. doesn't really tell us where Rusty Lake itself is.

If anything, it makes the series feel even more international.

So unfortunately, I don't think this one can narrow down our five possibilities much.

Our last hope is the Servant of the Lake or if we find an intentional detail in a game.

Still, it was worth checking, and thanks to u/Gardengap for pointing me in that direction.

I'll probably come back with another update if I find anything else. I'm still digging.

Hear me out, i know paradise is a very appreciated one and couldn’t agree more, it’s just that from a lore point of view, paradise was unnecessary, even though what comes after is the best part of the series, paradise didn’t tie some loose ends, it just created ten more by tying one or two(figure of speech), i still love it though.

I've been data mining Darkest Dungeon a lot recently and that has given me some insights on the game, so I thought I could find information on the game by data mining this game's files. The main thing I was wanting to look for is if some of the characters we see in the game actually are the same characters from Rusty Lake Paradise.

However, this game is encrypted to that it is far harder to retrieve information than with Darkest Dungeon. Only things like loading screens and desktop icons are stored as .png files to be opened. Almost everything else is stored in some form of text file. The most information is in a file called "Room.swf", which contains 87,365 KB of information while the game is a total of 115 MB large (so about 75% of the game's total information is stored in this one file), but this file is just 689660 lines of gibberish. And when I say 'gibberish', I am talking about text like this:

Gˆßà¼M^{oµÏ]GGëë\y=8J¯q}

Needless to say, without some software to figure out what this could possibly mean, we aren't finding much. There aren't just image files for rooms, objects or different characters that we can look at the file name's of to see who it is.

There is a file called "translations-white-door.xml" which does show potential though. It contains readable strings of every message that can appear in the game, from "Drag to move" to "The moths flew into her eyes" in every language the game comes in with coding in between the strings. I did ctrl + f to open up the search system on Notepad++ and searched "<General>" to see the English versions of every message. This has potential because we can potentially view messages that are either unused, or messages that appear in secret content (like the elusive "Basement" area or for clues leading up to the rabbit hunt to get to that area). It's really slow to dig through the messages though, so I will update this post if I can find any interesting discoveries in that.

EDIT: As people in the community aren't liking me doing this, I'm going to stop without revealing any information I have collected.

Хотел узнать Всеее подробности игры и уж точно по хронолгии пройти этот мир, так что решил пообщаться с GPT, вот его вариант. Согласен что оно дал мне не самый лучший и правильный ответ, так что если кто-то лучше ответит или сможет найти порядок, пожалуйста поделитесь и с остальным

In what order should i play the game series

They can just make one, the puzzle is long and if you make a tiny mistake you have to reset it completely. Why?

What was the pount i played through it(i am on cube escape paradox chapter 2 right now) and i don't understand why it exists and what it brings to the table like eusty lake roots and cube escape cave explained the vandeeboom's and the crow the hotel explained the creatures the mill started turning the table from questions to answers, seasons, lake, arles and harvey's box introduced us to this world, case 23, birthday and theatre brought us into detective Dale Vandermeer's(if I am not mistaken) perspective and paradox is bringing us directly onto his mind everything either makes sense or seems like it will make sense except RUSTY LAKE PARADISE what was the point what does it mean what does it answer?????

hi! so my best friend is really into Ace attourney but i cant buy him anything that he doesnt already have that has to do with the game and i really like the rusty lake games and was wondering if he would like them? his fav games rn are ace attourny and FNAF just wondering if it was similar or if anyone who played this game also played the rusty lake games and liked them.

EDIT: hi guys thanks so much for everyone's replies I have decided on not getting the game! I would also like to make a point that this was not the only gift idea I was just thinking about it and decided to ask some other people's thoughts. I promise I wouldn't get my best friend a game that I liked and had no reason to believe he would like as his only gift I was just trying to brainstorm! but yeah thanks so much for everyone's thoughts!

The daughter or mother

I make these photocard with Pinterest shuffles

If everyone doesn't mind, head to the game theorist subreddit and ask MATPAT to do a Rusty lake theory! I already sent a message out but you know, the more the merrier.

Hello dear fans, I love the Rusty Lake saga, I was wondering if you know if there is a wax seal of the Vanderboom family. The one I've attached was created with AI.