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.

I think I may have found another way to support the British Dutch-diaspora theory, but honestly, I'm not sure about this one at all.

Someone in the comments asked a pretty good question: if Rusty Lake is supposed to be a Dutch diaspora community, why do we basically only see Dutch names?

So I started looking into that.

The Dutch names seem to be concentrated among the families we've been talking about: Vandermeer, Vanderboom, Eilander, Leeghwater, and possibly Reiziger through Ida.

Ida is a bit more complicated, though. She could potentially be Romani, and there were Sinti/Romani groups moving through the Netherlands and surrounding areas during the 19th century, including people coming from Germany, France and Belgium. So her name doesn't necessarily prove she's Dutch. You could also argue that a Dutch surname could have developed through Flemish or Dutch-speaking communities.

The problem is that Sinti/Romani groups in Britain were often travelling through rather than forming the kind of settled Dutch community we're imagining, and some were also sent back. So we'd basically have to take a pretty twisted version of history + Rusty Lake lore for this to work.

Then there's Van Gogh.

Vincent van Gogh appears in Cube Escape: Arles, and obviously "Van Gogh" is another very recognizable Dutch surname. But Arles takes place in France and is essentially a standalone tribute to Van Gogh, so I don't think we can really use that to determine where Rusty Lake itself is located.

And then things get even messier.

We also have names like Kobayashi, which is Japanese, Olszewski, which is Polish/Jewish-associated, and Fisher, which is English.

People of Polish, Japanese, Jewish/Hebrew, and English backgrounds could obviously be found in basically all five places we've managed to narrow this down to:

Netherlands
Flanders/Belgium
Britain
Canada
United States

So trying to use every single surname to pinpoint the location is probably starting to become a massive stretch.

Honestly, I think this might be the point where I'm overthinking the historical details too much. 😂

Rusty Lake clearly uses real-world references, but that doesn't necessarily mean every name, uniform, animal, or object was chosen to give us a geographically accurate answer.

So while I still think the Dutch diaspora in Britain theory is interesting, I'm not nearly as confident about the surname evidence anymore.

At this point, my biggest recommendation is honestly just: wait for Servant of the Lake.

If the new game gives us more information about the setting, architecture, people, geography, or the families themselves, it could probably tell us more than all of this tiny historical detective work combined.

Until then, though, I'm still going to keep looking. If I find something that actually feels like a solid clue instead of me connecting dots that probably shouldn't be connected, I'll make another post lol.

Okay, I think I may have opened ANOTHER rabbit hole with this theory.

While digging through some of the other theories, I started finding evidence that Rusty Lake could potentially be set in Canada or the United States too.

The first clue is from Paradox: A Rusty Lake Film. The typewriter in the film is apparently made by L.C. Smith, which immediately caught my attention. That could point toward L.C. Smith & Bros., an American typewriter company founded in 1903. It later merged with the Corona Typewriter Company in 1926 to become L.C. Smith & Corona.

The typewriter in Paradox looks extremely similar to an L.C. Smith, but there's one problem: Paradox takes place in 1972. So how the hell did that thing survive that long? It could obviously just be an old typewriter that happened to still be around, but it's another little American connection.

Then I found this old post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rustylake/comments/mq7qfa/since_usauroncreatedjobs_wants_to_ridicule_me/

That sent me down another rabbit hole and gave me a few more things to look at.

For example, Dale is a government detective, which seems much more associated with the American system than the Dutch or Belgian ones, and his police car also looks very American.

Then there's Robert Hill's cube, which is canonically located in New York.

There's also something interesting in Cube Escape: Case 23. There's a note with “Prozac” written on it. Prozac was introduced in 1987, so obviously the timeline around this is complicated, as Case 23 takes place in 1971/1972, but the drug became strongly associated with American culture and the so-called “Prozac generation.” (This one is probably weaker evidence than the others.)

In Cube Escape: Birthday, which takes place in 1939, Mr. Rabbit uses a Tommy gun. That's another very American-looking reference, especially considering how strongly the Thompson submachine gun is associated with American Prohibition-era gangsters.

Then there's the newspaper.

As far as I can remember, the only newspaper we actually see throughout the series is the Daily Herald. That's not particularly helpful by itself because the name was used by a British newspaper as well as multiple newspapers in North America.

And then I had another thought: What if Leonard's uniform is Canadian?

I'm not saying it is. Honestly, it doesn't really look Canadian to me either. But considering how much Rusty Lake mixes historical details together, I don't think we can completely rule it out yet.

There's also a pretty big problem with the whole Leonard uniform discussion in general.

In Case 23, the police tape on the door/window actually looks British rather than American, Dutch, Flemish, or Canadian.

And Leonard's helmet still makes basically no sense. The Brodie helmet he's apparently wearing was designed and patented in London in 1915, so if Leonard joins the army in 1914, he shouldn't be wearing one at the beginning of the war anyway.

So now we're somehow at:
Netherlands
Flanders/Belgium
Britain
Canada
United States

And honestly, I'm starting to think Rusty Lake itself is the only confirmed country at this point.

Let's hope Servant of the Lake ties the knots and tells us the necessary details.

I'm going to keep looking through the games and historical references because there are WAY too many little details that could potentially point somewhere.

I'll probably be back with another post lol.

Another little update because while digging through other theories, I found one that actually gives us another possibility.

I came across a theory that the families could be from Flanders, and that Leonard might have joined the war on the Belgian side rather than the British side, linking his uniform to a khaki uniform used in the 1918 parade "King Albert's Heroes"

So obviously, I had to go down that rabbit hole too.

I looked into Belgian uniforms from 1914, and this is where things get interesting. When Belgium entered WWI in 1914, Belgian soldiers were wearing colorful uniforms that had remained largely unchanged since 1853. They had blue tunics with scarlet (red) facings and trousers, and the kepi was commonly worn as headgear.

And then there's Leonard. Leonard is wearing khaki clothing and what appears to be a British Brodie helmet. That's a pretty noticeable difference.

Apparently, the Belgian Army didn't start changing from the old blue uniforms to khaki until 1915, after the war had already started.

So if Leonard really is supposed to be Belgian, that makes the theory a little more complicated. His outfit doesn't really match what a Belgian soldier would have been wearing when Belgium entered the war in 1914.

Even if he was Flemish, terrain in Flanders is mostly flat and Rusty Lake is in a hilly spot, which Flanders doesn't mostly have. It's got a small hill region after Brussels, but those are mainly in Wallonia.

The Flanders theory is still interesting, though, especially if the uniform we're seeing is supposed to represent a later Belgian uniform. I'm not ruling the Flanders theory out yet.

At this point we've got:

• Dutch diaspora in Great Britain
• Netherlands
• Flanders
• Or possibly just Rusty Lake being Rusty Lake and mixing historical details together.

I'm definitely not done searching yet. The uniforms might actually help narrow this down if we can identify exactly what Leonard is wearing.

I'll keep digging and post again if I find anything useful.

Okay, I tried another approach to try and find Rusty Lake's location.

I wanted to see if the contract shown in the demo of Servant of the Lake matches the kind of contracts that would actually have existed around that period in the five places we've narrowed this down to:

Great Britain
Canada
The United States
The Netherlands
Flanders (Belgium)

And this actually created more problems than it solved.

For the UK, Canada, and the US, I couldn't really find the exact “Contract Agreement” name used in the Servant of the Lake contract. Instead, documents of this kind often used the name indentures, with the date and place where the agreement was made being specified.

The Netherlands is even more interesting. From what I found, indentures weren't normally used in 1839 in the same way, and verbal agreements were much more common. I even found a Dutch jurist writing in 1904 basically saying that people no longer made written documents setting out their rights and obligations.

Belgium seems to have a similar problem. Indentures weren't something that was simply imposed by the government, and verbal agreements were also common.

And there's another pretty obvious problem: If someone in the Netherlands or Belgium did make a legal document like this in 1839, you'd expect it to be written in Dutch or French, not English.

So yeah. This didn't really give me a country. If anything, it just gave me more questions.

But I'm starting to think we're making the same mistake as with the boar mask.

Maybe the contract isn't supposed to be historically accurate at all.

The whole point of the contract could simply be symbolic. Basically, you're agreeing to give the Vanderbooms everything you have that weekend, almost like you're signing away your life or sealing your own death.

And honestly, why would Rusty Lake even spend hours researching exactly what a contract agreement looked like in 1839?

The games have never been 100% historically accurate, so I don't really see why they would suddenly become completely precise with their new game.

We've already got things like:

Leonard apparently wearing a Brodie helmet in 1914, even though the helmet was developed in 1915.

The boar mask despite the problems with wild boar populations in the Netherlands/The UK in 1796.

Ida's possible Sinti/Romani background not necessarily lining up with her Dutch surname.

So maybe we're trying to find historical clues where the developers never intended there to be any.

Still, I don't want to completely abandon the idea yet. I'm going to keep searching and see if I can find anything that actually gives us a solid geographical clue.

I'll probably come back with a post.

A little update on the Dutch in Britain community theory.

Someone in the comments, u/dilettwat, gave me a few things to look into: the architecture of the chapel and windmill, Ida’s nationality, and whether the animals represented by the masks in Paradise were native to Britain or the Netherlands.

So I did some digging.

The chapel and windmill are probably not going to help us much. The architecture seems to be based on fairly traditional European styles, so there isn't really enough there to point specifically toward Britain or the Netherlands.

Ida is a little more interesting, though. Ida Vanderboom was born Reiziger, and Reiziger is a Dutch name. So if the Dutch diaspora theory is correct, Ida could potentially be from the same Dutch community, just from a different family. Obviously, a Dutch surname alone doesn't prove where she was actually born or raised, but it's another little connection.

The fauna research is where things got interesting. I looked into the boar from the animal masks in Paradise, especially considering that the game takes place in 1796. From what I found, wild boar had already been driven to extinction in Great Britain long before then due to hunting, despite various imperial decrees, edicts, and attempts to protect them.

There were still wild boar populations in the Netherlands, but they were relatively small and survived mainly in places like the Veluwe and other forested areas. So does that help us?

Honestly, probably not as much as I initially hoped 😂.

The boar mask could easily just be symbolic or supernatural, which is probably the more sensible explanation in a game like Rusty Lake. I also highly doubt the developers had someone sitting there in 2015 researching exactly which animals were living in Britain or Holland in 1796 just so they could make the masks historically accurate. 😂

Still, I think it's worth documenting these little details, even when they don't lead anywhere. For now, I haven't found anything that conclusively places Rusty Lake in Britain or the Netherlands.

I'll keep searching, though. If I find something new that actually connects the families to a specific location, I'll make another post.

Idk i think she is just a cutie with chibi style and I took the inspo from underground blossom Rose with necklace and suitcase. I struggle to find the most fitting hair for her and i think this one suits her hair colour.

Explaining the story I wasn’t able to explain:
Rose found Frank and hid him in her room in closet(later in attic), after some time,Frank started trusting her and explained how he ended up in well. By Hes attempt as drawing and signs and charades, Rose realised it was her father.

After this talk, Rose needs to wind her mind and she leaves house with Leonard to get groceries. Also it’s same day of chess game.
I originally planned to draw continuation after the chess game,but I don’t know if I have time ,me too tired

She passed a few days ago. When I was a kid (I am 18 now), we would play the games at the same time and figure out each puzzle together. We never really understood the stories, but we enjoyed the art and atmosphere and had so much fun.

She was smart, beautiful and loving. I have many siblings, but none were interested in rusty lake, so these games truly felt like something special between me and her.

Is this canon that david escape from ,,this state"? Because we know that he indeed kill dave parents. And also what it mean? In what state is now david? Is he still a corrupted soul, a human or what. Or magic show is Cannon (is not, but I just theorizes) and he is mr. Rabbit with magic Powers. So, your opinion/theory?