Thank you so much for your incredible support for The Past Within since its release! We are honoured to read so many amazing reviews from our fans trying out our first co-op experience, it truly means a lot! Together with all your praise, we’ve also received some great constructive feedback from you, especially about the length of the game. We can completely understand if the game felt too short, or the experience may not be something for you, or perhaps you still prefer a single-player game from us. We’re very grateful to everyone that gave our game a try, and appreciate all of you that took the time to let us know what your experience was like overall!
Our team put 2.5 years of blood, sweat and tears (not to be confused with the in-game substances) into this project to create something new and exciting. It all started with what we called the shoebox idea: a 3D puzzle box with a peephole through which you could see a classical 2D room. But back then we had no idea what the game could or would become. We kept on iterating and decided to keep on pushing even when it became really hard and we almost pulled the plug out of the project. Luckily the first beta test of the co-op mechanism gave us the confidence to move forward and challenge ourselves in many ways: we had to move from Flash to Unity, we had to transform our distinctive 2D style into 3D style and, yes, also learn to create co-op puzzles for the first time ever. Keep in mind that we, as developers, also need to go out of our comfort zone from time to time in order to create new things. Feel free to read more background info about the development in our devlogs or in our community interview. And we didn't sit still while developing The Past Within; a new metro will arrive sooner than you think!
We are very proud of what The Past Within became and in case you didn't try it yet... we hope you will take the chance to experience it with a friend, a family member, a colleague or even a stranger (feel free to join our Discord.gg/rustylake). We hope it brings a smile to your face and you both will have a great (and hopefully special) experience together, like we saw on many occasions during the countless of playtest sessions. And now it is still the perfect time to try it, since we were able to extend our 40% launch discount with one more week:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1515210/The_Past_Within/
As always, thank you so much for your support and let’s make some (more) memories!
Rusty Lake Team
A few extra things:
- We are working on new trading cards, stay tuned!
- We have a little contest on social media to win an exclusive The Past Within t-shirt.
- Make sure to keep an eye on mysterious broadcasts on our Steam page and Youtube!
- Luckily we managed to do a small celebration with some special black cube cakes, a fitting sacrifice to The Lake ⬛️