Demo emerges from Rusty Lake's Underground Blossom

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Next installment of surreal point-and-click puzzle adventure series to arrive this summer on PC and mobile devices

Good news for fans of Rusty Lake, as not only has the next installment of the popular point-and-click surrealist puzzle adventure series been announced, but it's coming sooner than we might have expected with a demo to play in the meantime.

As is typical of this series, few story details have been revealed, but Underground Blossom sends players down into the train tunnels of the Rusty Lake Underground to "travel through the life and memories of Laura Vanderboom." Each metro station represents a different phase and an "important event" of Laura's life – not just her past, but even her future as well. To help her "make sense of her life and escape the corruption of her mind," at each station you must fulfill different tasks and find a way to access the next train to board.

Underground Blossom's hand-drawn art, atmospheric score by Victor Butzelaar, and first-person slideshow-style mechanics will be instantly familiar to fans of the indie developer's work. Players will explore seven distinct stops along the railway line, each of them filled with mysteries and secrets to uncover. There will also be many puzzles to solve, with little in the way of hand holding to help you out, though the game is not intended to be a lengthy one, with a projected play time of about two hours.

The first fifteen or so minutes of Underground Blossom can be enjoyed right away, as a playable demo is available now to download on Steam. The full version won't be much longer itself, as development was quietly begun while the team finished work on their co-op puzzler The Past Within. A few more months of fine-tuning and polish should be all the new game needs, arriving on PC (Steam, itch.io) and mobile devices sometime late this summer.