Rusty Lake Hotel

Rusty Lake Hotel is a puzzle game with an interesting and very creepy theme. You run a hotel where

you murder the guests and feed them to each other. But it's okay because they're animal-people.

Each room that the guests stay in consists of puzzles, and you have to sort out all the puzzles to kill the patiently unsuspecting victim. For example, at one point you have to balance some weights to learn the values of the weights so you can input a code to open a box which holds a knife. Which is not the murder weapon, but you can use it to take some blood which is one of the ingredients you need to make a poisoned bloody Mary. So, it's sufficiently puzzling.

This game does a pretty good job of building the mystery of why you're doing what you're doing. I kept going and finished this in one sitting (it's about 3 hours long) just to see what happens after you're finally done. Although I can't help but wonder what the secret ending is. Unfortunately, you need to get 3 stars on each meal which requires finding hidden items in the game which are sometimes not at all obvious where they could be found. And if you complete the rooms in the wrong order (and numerically is apparently the wrong order) you can't get them all. It's not a simple matter of just finding them, you have to restart and replay the whole game. So, that's a bit of a disappointment, but the game stands fairly strong even without the secret ending, so I can ignore that.

So, mostly good puzzles, intriguing creepy themes, it also comes with a walkthrough in case you get stuck, which is nice. If that sounds at all like your jam, this is only 2 bucks. 3/5 stars from me.

Addendum: After I finished this game, I did a bit of reading and discovered that the people who made it have also made a bunch of web games for free. So I started on those, and there's quite a few and they're also quite good. So if you're interested in whiling away your time on a creepy puzzle game, check out their website and give them a go. I got pretty hooked on them, actually, and I've played through everything they've made. There's this strange, confusing story that they're slowly telling and I feel compelled to see how it all ends.