Lake review (Gamious, 2021, PC, XB, PS, Switch)
Lake is a visual novel about mid-life crisis with a delivery itinerary minigame bolted on. You play Meredith Weiss, a computer programmer covering her father Thomas’ postal shift in a small Oregon town for two weeks; the duration of the campaign.
I completed the game in two sittings; spending the first one captivated by the sights, sounds and spirit of small-town America, looking forward to meeting Lake’s characters, and being immersed in embodying Meredith. Though you do have the opportunity to be tremendously catty and even a total shut-in, I made the early decision to play her as meaning well, trying to do right by other people in her life, old and new, and get actively involved in the townspeople’s lives, and it was really easy to slip into that role because of how seamlessly the game accommodates it. There were times where I was genuinely upset over having offended the person I was talking to with what I thought was the most polite or giving dialogue option, and I can’t recall the last time a game has immersed or made me care so much about that.
I spent the second sitting tiring of the postal workdays that the game typically uses to set up its narrative sections. There’s plenty of driving in a peaceful, stunning locale, and the driving itself is basically fine, other than that the minimap doesn’t reposition itself when you’re turning and reversing, which I found confusing at points. But it’s also the game at its most repetitive, most at risk of outstaying its welcome, and at its buggiest.
It was during this second session that I decided that, in all of this driving, I’d heard quite enough of the handful of songs on the car radio (and I do mean a handful; with the in-game disc jockey even commenting that their playlist needs more songs); a thematically appropriate but ultimately forgettable set of royalty-free country tunes which you can, to be fair, turn off. The rest of the sound, including the noise of the delivery van and even cutscene dialogue, will cut out (or just refuse to play) regularly; this happens less, apparently, if you limit your frames-per-second and disable V-sync in the graphics options. Characters will get stuck in their walking animations during cutscenes. I also found that blips for deliveries would sometimes appear in the (inaccessible) outer reaches of the map.
Losing cutscene dialogue was especially frustrating during the strand that involves the local video shop owner, which I thought was sweet, even when a little cloying, and which I was thrilled to be able to follow to its natural conclusion. Though the game’s basic premise seems to telegraph a particular ending, I was pleased to be able to swerve it entirely with no judgment from the game itself; I loved the developers’ take on Oregon, and actually found myself wistful at times for never having been to or grown up in a place as beautiful, charmful, or characterful as the town it takes place in, but I wouldn’t want to make it my life, or, as some of Lake’s characters do, my personality. I was able to use my intuition about the game’s setting, and its characters, to make meaningful decisions about the protagonist’s relationships with others and their future. It’s possible that I just haven’t played a game where ‘your choices matter’ in a long time (in part because, so often, they really don’t), but I was really blindsided by Lake, because, for the most part, they do. Writing this review in a flurry after watching the credits roll in their entirety, I’m not in any rush to test this theory by going back to do a nega-Meredith run by being a total droog, but I reckon I really could. without the game judging me at all. I also just think that being mean to the video shop owner would break my heart, so I’m happy to accept the ending that I chose as canon.
Despite having had this kind of profound experience, and being really glad that I made it to the end of Lake (a proper miracle on behalf of Gamious; I barely play games at all at this point), I’m also not clamouring for more. I don’t find myself caring about the downloadable content prequel, where you play as Thomas during the last Christmas holiday. I was touched by Lake, and made to feel nostalgic for a time and a place that I literally cannot have any nostalgia for at all, but I was also irritated by the amount of bugs. They were never game-breaking, but impacted the sights and sounds of an otherwise very special setting enough that I don’t want it spoiled anymore. I have smaller nitpicks, like the one scene where I was directing a friend’s recorded message for the radio, and saying that it was all good and not to change anything, but which decided to end with the message being changed anyway; or the fact that there are parodic film covers in the video shop while the owner makes reference to real films, and that mattered to me for some possibly silly reason; or that I never, at least through the ending I chose, got to tell my overenthusiastic boss back in the big city to shove his generous offer of a soulless promotion square up him, despite him telling me to think on it and let him know in the morning. But really it’s the bugs.
Regardless, I can recommend at least Lake’s base campaign to similarly emotionally wrecked lesbians with powerful attunements to themes of place, community, belonging, and connection.
