Sick Souls At The Rusty Lake

Laura Bell, Section #2

For each required text this semester, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds was not only my favorite, but it stood out to me in many, many ways. I've always been intrigued by the idea, or process more of, of self-betterment; the steps you can take to be better, and even the journeys others have taken to do so. There's something about watching someone claw their way out of a dark place that I find genuinely compelling. Not in some morbid way, more like... it's proof that it's possible. That people have been at the bottom and found something worth holding onto. 

What made this book even more enjoyable for me, though, and I mean this in the most sincere way, was how it kept reminding me of my favorite game series, Rusty Lake. Which I know sounds questionable? Bear with me lol.

I feel like I can't begin to describe just how much I love these games, but I'll try. Rusty Lake is a series of escape-room type mobile games. At first they seem super weird. Odd puzzles that barely make sense, strange animal-headed characters, an unsettling vibe that's hard to put your finger on, but overall just a kooky experience you kind of enjoy without fully understanding. But the more games you play, the more you start to see how each one connects. Little details from one game reappear in another. Characters you thought were minor turn out to be central. And slowly, across hours of gameplay, the buildup of an extensive, intricate, genuinely surprising timeline reveals itself. It's one of the most rewarding storytelling experiences I've ever had.

What really got me, though, is that underneath all the weirdness, these games are deeply preoccupied with philosophical topics, such as enlightenment. Characters pursue it, are destroyed by the pursuit of it, and are sometimes transformed by it into something unrecognizable. It's treated with the same weight and seriousness that James treats the question of whether life is worth living at all. The is also underlying Buddhist and Hindu concepts that bring everything in the games full circle in the talk of self-betterment.

 
So when SSHM started pulling up the same themes I'd been sitting with through these games – sick souls, the purpose of suffering, whether transformation is even possible – I couldn't stop making connections. The book and the games are asking the same questions, just in different ways. To explain my correlation between the two, I'll give you a brief rundown of the timeline for context. I got some of the story info from the Rusty Lake Wiki to make sure I had the details right.

Here are all the characters you need to know about for this post:

Everything revolves around the Rusty Lake, a mysterious body of water that acts almost like a living thing. It hungers for memories, and when it gets them, it can be used for powerful, dark purposes. Souls that die near the Lake don't always move on, they can become Corrupted Souls, violent shadow-like entities trapped between life and death in the forest at the bottom of the lake. Think of the Lake less like a setting and more like a system. It collects memories, recycles souls, and occasionally produces something it calls enlightenment. The tragedy of the series is that from the inside, being guided toward liberation and simply being processed look identical.

Two brothers, Aldous and William Vanderboom, reach the final stage of creating an Elixir of Life. William drinks first and dies, becoming a Corrupted Soul. Aldous drinks second and transforms into Mr. Crow,  one of the animal-masked figures you'll encounter throughout the series. This is the original mistake that sets everything in motion.

Around the same time, a man named Jakob Eilander is running the Lake's Hotel. His mother, Caroline, discovered a way to create the Elixir using ten elements, and was burned at the stake as a sacrifice for it. Through her memories and the elixir, Jakob reaches enlightenment and comes back to life as something entirely new: Mr. Owl, a being with suspected unlimited immortality and wisdom, created when Caroline's soul merged with Jakob's. This is the first and clearest example of what enlightenment actually means in this universe. It's not a reward, it's a transformation that requires you to be destroyed first. Jakob had to burn alive and merge with a corrupted soul to become something greater. That seems to be directly what mystics call the via negativa, where the self has to be stripped down – annihilated, even – before something transcendent can emerge. You don't add enlightenment to yourself. You lose everything that was blocking it.

Mr. Owl then becomes the de facto overseer of the Lake, orchestrating events, extracting memories, and setting other characters on their paths. Shortly after his transformation, five guests at the Hotel, Mr. Deer, Mr. Rabbit, Mrs. Pigeon, Ms. Pheasant, and Mr. Boar,  are murdered, prepared into meals, and their memories extracted into five black cubes. Their Corrupted Souls are imprisoned in tanks in Mr. Owl's room, where they stay for decades.

Those black cubes matter more than they look. In Buddhist and Hindu thought, memory, or samskara, which are accumulated mental impressions, is exactly what keeps the cycle of rebirth going. You're reborn because you're still attached to what happened before. Your memories are your chains. So, Mr. Owl extracting memories into black cubes isn't just creepy aesthetics, it's a literalisation of what enlightenment traditions say actually needs to happen. The memories have to be removed from the soul before it can move forward. 

The Corrupted Souls of the Hotel guests eventually escape and spend decades roaming the Lake, causing havoc. They're violent and unstable, but here's the thing: they're not monsters. Their minds are in withdrawal, addicted to identity and memory, desperately grabbing for something from a past life that might stabilise them. In Buddhism, the closest concept is the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as terrifying, full of violent instinctive reactions. The souls in the bardo aren't evil; they're just disoriented, stripped of the ego-structures that made them function in life. Corrupted Souls are that phase made visible and physical.

Meanwhile, James Vanderboom plants a tree in his yard. One that grows across generations with the family's sacrifices and memories, all building toward a single goal: the reincarnation of William's lost soul.

William's Corrupted Soul eventually finds itself in the Samsara Room, learns of the circle of life, and through various transformations is reborn as Laura Vanderboom, his great, great, great grand niece. She doesn't know any of this. To her, she's just a woman living a difficult life – one marked by severe depression and Prozac medication.

In 1969, Laura wins a newspaper competition to stay at a Cabin at Rusty Lake, advertised as a place that helps people with mental illness. While she's there, a Corrupted Soul attacks her from the Lake. She goes home, but she can't escape what she saw. Flashbacks, visions, a premonition of her own death. In the summer of 1971, the depression wins, and she becomes a shadow and stabs herself. The shadow that killed her was her own Corrupted Soul, externalised. She was killed by herself.

What makes her tragedy so specific is that she wasn't just psychologically unwell,  she was broken. She was born as a corrupted soul reincarnated into human flesh, carrying the weight of William's failed experiment in her very being before she ever drew a breath. She was born broken by something that happened before she existed. She spent her whole life fighting a shadow that was, in a very real sense, her own previous self. The knowledge that could have saved her – that the darkness inside her was not an illness to be medicated but a soul to be understood – was exactly what the Lake withheld.
After her death, Mr. Crow extracts her memories into black cubes to feed the Lake, her soul goes on to haunt the Mill, and she becomes yet another piece in the machinery. Everyone else in this story is moving toward something. 

In 1939, on Dale Vandermeer’s ninth birthday, Mr. Rabbit – one of the escaped Hotel souls, while feeling unstable and desperate – murders Dale's entire family. Dale grows up to become a homicide detective, eventually assigned to investigate the mysterious death of an unidentified woman: Laura. After a year of research and obsession, he finds himself drawn to Rusty Lake, but not by chance. Mr. Owl has been watching him his whole life.

Dale's journey is the series' closest thing to a success story. After completing Mr. Owl's trials, he's told his mind has reached a higher state of consciousness. That he's now learning about his past and future and what he may become. It's genuinely moving, and also a little unsettling, because you have to ask: did Dale choose this? Or was he always going to end up here?

Despite me basically spoiling the whole thing for you, I highly recommend you play these games!! There is so much I just couldn’t cover here, and playing the games for yourself if an experience you shouldn’t miss out on. You can find them in both the Apple and Play Store, just search up Rusty Lake and you will see each game developed. I suggest you start with Cube Escape Collection, that way you can get the most gameplay. 

If you don’t feel like playing them however, Flawed Peacock on YouTube has a great series detailing every single released game (as of 2025 I think) and the theories behind it. If you have about 16 hours on hand for his full playlist, I propose you go for it. (Here's a link to the 4th video in his Series Explained, it's not in his main playlist.)

Rusty Lake's Official YouTube. Rusty Lake Official Website :)

After that long lecture, let's get back to my main point here: how does all of the video game lore and enlightenment connect to SSHM?

William James drew a distinction between two kinds of people: the "sick-souled," who think life might be meaningless, and those who manage to cultivate "healthy-mindedness," an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. Kaag presents this as a journey: the sick soul is not a failed person, but a person at a specific, painful stage of becoming. James's entire philosophy was geared to save a life – his own life – because he had stood at the edge of meaninglessness himself and found a way back. Rusty Lake, it turns out, is a universe built entirely around that same precipice. Almost every character in it is a sick soul. Very few find their way back.

James believed that the sick soul actually has a philosophical advantage over the naively happy. Someone who has never confronted meaninglessness, who floats through life on good feelings, hasn't really reckoned with what existence is. The sick soul, by contrast, has looked at the void. That confrontation, excruciating as it is, is the necessary precondition for any genuine transformation, or in this case, enlightenment. You cannot reach healthy-mindedness by bypassing darkness. You pass through it. This maps almost exactly onto enlightenment in Rusty Lake: The Corrupted Soul is not a detour away from liberation, it is the required stage before it. Jakob Eilander is burned alive, merged with corruption, and becomes Mr. Owl. The darkness is not an incidental step, it's necessary to reach enlightenment. 

Laura is the series's most complete portrait of a sick soul. She was, in the deepest sense, born sick: William's corrupted soul reincarnated into human flesh, carrying metaphysical damage she couldn't understand. Her depression was more ontological, written into what she was before she drew her first breath. James would recognise her immediately, not as broken, but as someone for whom the usual consolations simply don't reach deep enough. Prozac doesn't touch a corrupted soul. What she needed was not medication but meaning, a framework that could hold the darkness she was carrying and tell her it was survivable, even purposeful. Instead, the Lake took her memories and fed them to its machine.

This is where Rusty Lake diverges from James in its most unsettling way. James asked "Is life worth living?" as a genuine, open question – one he believed could be answered, with effort and honesty, in the affirmative. Rusty Lake asks the same question but is far less confident about the answer. James believed free will was real. That the sick soul could, through deliberate action and habit, choose to reorient itself toward life. He famously declared that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will, a defiant and self-gratifying act of meaning making in a deterministic world. Rusty Lake's characters have almost no free will at all. Dale is guided by Mr. Owl from childhood. Laura's fate seems sealed by William's failure centuries before her birth. The Lake's cycle runs whether anyone consents to it or not.

And yet the series doesn't fully abandon James's hope. Dale does reach what Mr. Owl calls a higher state of consciousness. Jakob does transform. Even Bob (Laura’s ex), grinding through his amnesia in The White Door, is engaged in exactly the Jamesian process: reconstructing meaning from fragments, choosing to keep going without knowing why, trusting that the habit of living has value even when feeling has deserted him. Bob's daily routine at The White Door – wake up, make the bed, follow the program – is not just him doing what he has been conditioned to do. It's Jamesian practice: doing the next right thing because the consequences of not doing it are worse than the uncertainty of doing it.

What Sick Souls, Healthy Minds gives us, as a lens onto Rusty Lake, is compassion for the characters the series sometimes treats as merely pieces in a larger puzzle. Laura wasn't a failed soul. She was a sick one, and the tragedy isn't that she didn't try hard enough, but that no one could understand her pain well enough to help her.

I think that's what made this book more eye-opening for me than the others this semester. James was writing from the edge, for people on the edge. And whether you find that edge in your own life or in a weird little mobile game about a lake that absorbs memories, the question he's asking is the same one: is this survivable? Can something come out the other side? James says yes. Rusty Lake isn't so sure. And honestly, sitting with both of those answers at the same time feels more true to life than either one alone.