The Past Within is the new co-op experience from Rusty Lake! Play together with someone you deem trustworthy: one in The Past, the other in The Future. Observe and communicate what you see around you. Solve the puzzles and uncover Albert Vanderboom’s plan.
The Past Within is a co-op-only game. Both players will need a copy of the game and a way to communicate with each other. Play together with a friend, or find a partner on our official Discord.
We are beyond excited to finally share The Past Within, our new exciting co-op experience, with all of you!
The development of the game has been an amazing journey of over 2,5 years that lead us to this point. It all started with a simple shoe box idea that turned out to become quite the unique co-op experience which - in our opinion - is the closest we’ve ever gotten to creating a real-life escape room!
We are incredibly proud that we made it through all the hurdles and can finally share this unique co-op experience with you all. Many of you are probably already familiar with our devlogs where we shared the struggles we had to overcome for this project to come to life: our first 3D project, switching from Flash to Unity, and above all creating our first co-op puzzle game!
And we couldn’t have done it without the incredible team behind this project. For The Past Within we had to grow our very small team to more than 20+ people that have been working relentlessly behind the scenes. All of those people are listed in our credits, so please take a moment to appreciate all of them after finishing the game. In particular, we want to thank our core development team Luuk Waarbroek & Martijn van Buul for their amazing effort in overcoming all the struggles we faced along the way. Our 3D artist Bart Wiltenburg and 2D artist Maarten Pelders both of whom masterfully helped transform our distinctive 2D style into 3D. The soundtrack of the game unsurprisingly turned out to be once again a masterpiece under Victor Butzelaar’s capable hands, despite all the difficulties of co-op. And wow can we talk about the sound design from Jorick & Gilliam of Driftwood audio, their work elevated this project to new heights beyond everything we could have hoped for. Bob Rafferty jumped in to give a voice to Albert, and he once again did a terrific job for such an important character of the series!
From our community Manager Andreea to our Q&A team Ruben & Bart, all the amazing help from our brilliant translators that brought this experience to more than 20 languages (more to come!), our beloved Discord mods and of course the hundreds of beta testing couples - thank you all so much for all your hard work and effort!
Most of all, we want to thank all of you for your ongoing support! It’s been quite a while since we’ve released anything new, and The Past Within is definitely something new and different compared to anything we’ve made so far! And while we understand it won’t be for everyone in our community, we hope that, over time, you can give it a try with someone you think will enjoy sharing this experience with you! And to everyone who is excited to play: are you ⬛#TeamPast or 🟨#TeamFuture?
Together, let's make some memories! 🙏
Robin & Maarten
Ps.
A mysterious broadcast might come up again, make sure to keep an eye out!