Lake is a peaceful, relaxing game where you drive around delivering Mail in the Oregon town of Providence Oaks in 1986. It’s basically the amalgamation of Endless Ocean and Life is Strange (sans superpowers or villains), a kind of remarkable normalness that’s comfortable to settle into now that the concept of “normal” no longer exists in the modern world. Lake landed in my lap right as one of my dogs got really sick and had to spend a terrifying night alone at the vet, and it proved to be a decent distraction given that context. Once she started to recover and I had time to dig into the underlying mechanics and choices, however, the limitations became apparent and I struggled to get back into the gameplay to explore additional outcomes. Lake can be an entertaining game, but only if you’re looking to burn some free time and don’t mind being railroaded.

Lake is about choices with no bad answers, which creates an optimistic but surreal world

Main Character Meredith Weiss takes a break from computer software development to take over her father’s mail job for two weeks, returning her to the town in which she grew up for the first time in 22 years. Some of the characters she knew from her childhood remain in town, which allows her to catch up with a few different characters after that prolonged absence in addition to making the acquaintance of several new ones. Lake is all about meeting the characters and deciding if and how they still fit into Meredith’s life. Ultimately, whether she’s charmed by the quietness and close-knit community of small-town life or leaves to continue her former life of developing computer software is up to you. And depending on your choice, she can end up romantically linked to either a male lumberjack or female video store owner who correlate to the options to stay and leave, respectively.

There are no bad answers here. There’s no possibility of ending up broke or struggling against anything, really, and this is one of the many ways Lake manages to be a remarkably optimistic game. Even if you choose the harshest conversation options, characters will usually admit that they earned the reprimand or assume that you meant something less harsh. It’s bizarre. I can think of only one character who takes offense in the entire game, and that’s elderly cat lady Mildred Jenkins.

I want to push Mildred Jenkins down a flight of stairs. That’s one of the pitfalls of making a primarily story-centric game with such a small cast of characters—every character’s flaws (or conspicuous, unbelievable absence of flaws) are magnified because they make up a sizable portion of the end product. I also wasn’t a huge fan of Robert the lumberjack or the guy who works at the hotel. They’re both bland.

Part of the problem is that Lake takes place over a two-week span, and that’s simply not enough time for characters Meredith doesn’t already know to open up. There are two major exceptions to this, with the first being a precocious child who opens up because children don’t have much going on to talk about besides idly speculating about the future. The other is the game’s lesbian love interest, Angie. She has some slightly aggravating personality quirks like many other characters, but she’s also one of the few characters with an arc, and the radical changes in her life help to justify her willingness to open up to a near-stranger after just a few days. Both of these characters are written pretty well, all things considered.

This is a game for people who enjoy slowly delivering mail, not those looking for choices

The main gameplay in Lake is literally just mail delivery. You begin each day next to the truck, and then you drive around delivering letters to houses marked with one prompt and packages to another. Even this probably sounds more complex than it is; Meredith automatically selects the correct letter for the house you’re at, so delivering these is as simple as walking up to the mailbox and pressing a button, while delivering packages has the extra step of going to the back of the mail truck and picking out the package with the correct address. It sounds boring, and in many ways it is, but there’s a relaxing quality to just sitting down and delivering mail to a bunch of characters. I got tired of the slow movement speed faster than I burned out on the actual mail delivery, actually—Meredith’s walking speed is pitiful, and the mail truck observes the speed limit at all times.

It’s physically impossible to knock over signs or trees, and NPCs can similarly stop your momentum in an instant. I found it weirdly difficult to let go of everyone’s long-used gaming habit of knocking over stop signs in order to round corners marginally faster. Other than that and the slow movement speed, though, I don’t have any real criticisms of the driving and mail delivery. It’s exactly what I expected it to be.

The “branching story” promised on the store page is very misleading, though. I was very careful on my first playthrough to focus on characters I liked while shunning everyone else, primarily out of a worry that events would overlap. Then I used Cheat Engine’s speedhack feature to blow through the game a second time, making sure to take every NPC up on every after-work offer they brought up and choose radically different dialog options, and nothing changed. I beat the child NPC’s high score on an arcade game. No one ever acknowledged it. I dated both Robert and Angie simultaneously. No one cared. There are no overlaps, and since these after-work events unlock options at the very end of the game, there’s no reason not to do everything on your first run. If you don’t, then you’ll feel pretty stupid having to redeliver two weeks of mail. All of the story branches are at the very end.

This would be less of a problem if Lake‘s dialog could be skipped through, but it can’t. I pressed every button on the controller. Each replay forces you to listen to the voice actors slowly chewing their lines, and while that’s fine at first, eventually it grated on me to the point where the game stopped being relaxing. That’s actually the reason I loaded up the speedhack to make the game run faster. Speaking of which, I discovered something bizarre in the process: every character’s dialog skips ahead except for Mildred Jenkins. I repeat: I want to push Mildred Jenkins down some stairs.

Lake‘s visuals are pleasant but repetitive, while its music is pretty good but anachronistic

The visuals here are very Life Is Strange, but with a more cartoony bent that’s a couple of steps closer to Fortnite. The area design is great, and it doesn’t take long to figure out where everything is in town and plan out an efficient route, but the scenery does begin to grow old after several days of the same sunrise and sunshine. The very last days add some interest with rain and lightning, but some more variation early on would have helped to keep things interesting. Another thing I noticed is that I found it difficult to follow the movements of characters because they never move around during conversations. At best, they teleport around to imply movement. It’s an unusual limitation that I can’t recall ever noticing before.

The in-game music has some ups and downs (the guitar and singing in that teleportation video I just linked to is definitely a low), but there’s also licensed music to spice things up while you’re driving around. It’s all very good but unquestionably anachronistic. Lake knows the time period it’s operating in, as evidenced by a character receiving a Yamaha DX7—an iconic 80s synth keyboard responsible for iconic sounds in Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” and A-ha’s “Take On Me”—in the mail. Instead, though, the licensed music sounds more late-90s (which modern culture’s nostalgia has ensured remains a “current” sound), with one song reminding me of Sixpence None the Richer and other bands sounding like others I heard on the radio in the late 90s. That’s not inherently a bad thing so much as it’s just odd. Sadly, the slow driving speed means these songs will be drilled deep into your brain by the end of the game. Even the in-game DJ admits that he needs more music for the radio station. Who am I to disagree?

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Lake review. I deliberately ignored some events and it took me around 5 and a half hours to finish. Doing everything might add 30 minutes to that. Possibly even less.

Lake review – Warm and fuzzy nothingness first appeared on Killa Penguin