Lake captures the experience of coming back to your small-town home, working and meeting back up with all of the people who used to be such a big part of your life.
Going back to your home town, especially after making a life somewhere else, is something that is quite daunting and often looked down upon. In small towns, getting out seems like the ultimate goal, and a way of becoming quite successful. In Lake, you play as Merideth, who had moved away from her small town, years ago, and is now working in technology, creating an app that will keep you organized, before computers were quite commonplace. But now you’re back in that town you left behind.
You are actually back at your home town for two weeks – a two week vacation from work, but at the same time, doing a favor for your father who is on a real vacation with your mother. You will be filling in for him on his mail delivery route. Each day, you wake up, deliver the mail, and see who you run into. It’s a small town, and there are a handful of characters, so meeting them and seeing people who used to have an active role in your life is always interesting.
Lake has a captivating small town feel in its winding roads. You are able to make decisions when it comes to your day-to-day life, and as this is a narrative-driven game, a lot of these decisions are done through talking to other people. In small towns, everyone always helps each other. That’s just what happens. You have the option to help a lumberjack stop people from cutting down the local forest, help a newcomer with her movie rental business, help a constantly-angry shopkeeper with her photography work, and even help a wacky cat lady with various small tasks. Everyone has different things they seem to need, and as you help them, you get to know them.
There are a lot of small sub stories in Lake, from your co-worker doing dodgy things to the ability to start relationships with two different characters. Your old friend from high school is even looking to you for help in continuing her dreams. All of this is sandwiched between the monotonous task of delivering packages and mail to the right place, so you do end up spending a lot of time driving your van.
The gameplay in Lake is pretty straightforward, and I found it to be a great game to play in the evening as you listen to the sound track and talk to people who all seem to have stuff going on. The game isn’t particularly long and does a good job of feeling like a slice of life indie game with a bit more story thrown in, but I do wish Lake had more polish.
You see, in Lake, there are lot of different ways you can interact with people – and I found that sometimes it didn’t matter what I said. I said yes to being gifted an RV, and then the character gave it to a 16 year old to fix up. In the last day of the game, the person who owned a video store told me SHE had been given an RV, and SHE gave it to the 16 year old to fix up, and now it was done. Small things like this really broke the story – my photos all came out black for some reason, yet I still placed in the photography contest. I often felt like the things I was picking just didn’t matter, and either decision option would result in the reply I got from the character.
The visuals were good, but often the textures would pop and click in a way that made the world seem quite odd, and the audio tracks – it was very clear they only had a few different songs for your car. These details really stuck out, because otherwise, Lake is a really great game. I loved meeting all of these small town people, deciding if I should continue working or stay here forever, and understanding more about my parents and their lives. It was like being thrown back in time to a simpler world and a simpler place.
Lake is available now on the Microsoft Store and Steam. It is also available for free on Xbox Game Pass (which is where I picked it up!).
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This sounds like such a fun, cute game! I’ll give it a try! 🙂
Great review Jupiter!