The Past Within

The Past Within is the first co-op-only point-and-click adventure in the Rusty Lake universe, and it's built explicitly around the premise that you cannot play it alone. Two players are required, each with their own copy and a separate voice or chat channel between them. One plays in The Past, the other in The Future, and the puzzles are designed so that each side only has half of the information needed to solve them.

The central narrative thread follows Rose and her father Albert Vanderboom, and the surreal logic of the Rusty Lake series carries through — symbols, ritual objects, recurring characters and a willingness to leave half the meaning underneath the surface for players to recover. The Past Within is the first Rusty Lake game to mix 2D and 3D presentation in the same play session: one player experiences the world as a flat scene, the other navigates it as a small 3D space, and most of the communication friction comes from translating between those two perspectives.

The game runs about two hours per playthrough across two chapters, but is openly designed to be replayed — both because each player only sees half the game the first time and because a replayability feature regenerates puzzles with new solutions. Cross-platform play means the two players can each pick whichever version (PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and soon Switch) suits them, as long as they can talk to each other while they play.