I loved Seasons the most. The game seemed soaked in an engrossing atmosphere of mental illness and poignant delusion - the distorted voices, the undefined nostalgia, the eerie solitude, the repetitive imagery... It seemed like a deeply personal mystery to unravel.

I still like the Rusty Lake series, but it took a very different path than I expected. The surrealism no longer strikes me as hallucinogenic or particularly symbolic. The dudes with bird heads actually have bird heads, not because they're distorted through the lens of psychosis but because alchemy was going on in that universe...? The enigmatic blonde woman is now just a little piece of a grander story, not a key figure in a tight character-centric narrative.

Rusty Lake feels like it zoomed way out and sacrificed that sense of claustrophobic horror and emotional investment in exchange for a more expansive scope and paranormal worldbuilding. It's still intriguing, but honestly, I find it quite unfocused now.