Somewhere down in that insanely long tail of tags (Sorry, "Labels".) that follows every post, there's one for a game called Lake. I've used it four times. This is the fifth and almost certainly the last.
The first time I mentioned it was in June 2021, when I reviewed some demos I'd been playing for Next Fest. I ended by saying "Lake is on my wishlist now and I highly recommend the demo. It's almost a game in itself."
As you can almost certainly guess, I didn't buy the game when it came out. That turned out to be just as well because the next time I posted about it, in April 2023, it was to say it had cropped up as one of the freebies in that month's Amazon Prime offer. I admitted to having been "too mean" to pay money for it, thereby proving that both procrastination and parsimony really do pay.
The next time it came up in dispatches was only a couple of months later, in June 2023, when I was rambling on about Steam constantly reminding me about things on my wishlist going on sale. It wasn't entirely clear whether I was complaining about it or thanking them but on balance I imagine it must have been the latter.
Apparently I'd been about to buy Crowns and Pawns off the back of such a prompt, when I saw Lake was also on the list. That jogged my memory enough for me to remember I already owned it on Prime, meaning I didn't have to spend any money to get something off the list. Always good to hear.
Two things to say about that. First, I really have some serious issues with short-term memory. Second, I did go on to buy Crowns and Pawns at some point, presumably on the assumption lightning wouldn't strike twice. So far it hasn't but it is exactly the kind of game that does turn up on Prime so it could still happen.
The last time I posted anything about Lake, or at least anything I felt was significant enough to justify using a Label, was in April of last year. That was a whole post about games I'd stopped playing for no good reason and how I ought to go back to them.
Six games were on that list. Lake was one. The good news is that I have now finished three out of the six - Crowns and Pawns and Tales Noir: Preludes, both of which I have posted about very recently and Lake, which I'm about to give my final verdict on now. (Hold on - it's coming!)
Of the other three, one is Valheim, which even the developers seem incapable of finishing, so I'm giving myself a permanent pass on that one. Then there's My Time At Sandrock, which I have been thinking of trying again, although it would be a much bigger task than any of the unfinished games I've successfully tidied up so far. I put almost seventy hours into the first "My Time At..." game (Portia.) and still never got to the end. There's a third on the way but I'll probably skip that.
The unfinished game I intend to tackle next is Imposter Factory. I'm quite a way into that, I think. It ought to be doable.
I am finding it quite satisfying, tying up some of these dangling threads. After they're done, I might even buy a couple of new games. I really ought to play Old Skies for a start...
But for now, let's wrap up on Lake. In case anyone (Meaning everyone.) has forgotten what it's about, here's the Steam Store description:
"It's 1986 - Meredith Weiss takes a break from her career in the big city to deliver mail in her hometown. How will she experience two weeks in beautiful Providence Oaks, with its iconic lake and quirky community? And what will she do next? It's up to you."
And that's about it. You play Meredith, an independent, single woman working at a software company in New York in the mid-80s. She's agreed to take two weeks of vacation time to come back and fill in for her dad, the mail-carrier in the small, lakeside town where she grew up. He's just retired and he and Meredith's mother have gone away on a vacation of their own. The job is vacant for now. Maybe Meredith might even want to take it on full time?
That seems like a weird set-up to me. I'd love to know if that's a thing that really happens in the U.S., people being asked - and allowed - to sub for others in responsible jobs purely because they're related in some way.
It for sure would never happen here, not even in the 1980s. Not even in small towns in the country. Unless it's in some wholly private business you own and run, like a family business specifically, you can't just get your adult children in to do your job for you while you go on holiday, much less when you retire. And even leaving the ethics of it all aside, how is Meredith even remotely qualified? She has no experience of delivering mail and as far as I can tell she's never even driven a mail truck before.
I had a bit of a problem with all of that but I applied suspension of disbelief and it was fine. It wasn't the only time I needed it, though. There's the issue of Meredith's age, for another.
In the first draft of the previous paragraph I wrote that I guessed she was in her late twenties or early thirties. Then I saw on the developer's notes on the Store page that she's actually "forty-something". I literally just finished the game last night and I thought she was much younger than that. Her burgeoning mid-life crisis makes a lot more sense now!
What the game is all about is making choices. Meredith is at a crossroads in her life. It's down to you to pick which way she goes.
Discovering Meredith's story is the visual novel element cutting in but Lake is more than just a visual novel for two reasons, the big one being that you have to drive a mail truck and deliver mail. For real. As in actually drive. Like it's a driving game. Which it is, albeit probably the world's slowest and safest.
You can roll the truck, run it into fences, crash into other cars... There's no penalty for bad driving but you do have to drive.
I enjoyed the driving but there is a lot of it. The game has an average run-time of around seven hours and I wouldn't be at all surprised if half of that is spent delivering mail. I vaguely remember seeing there was some way to automate the actual driving but I think all that does is drive the truck for you so you don't crash. It still takes just as long to go around the route.
The driving, like the walking, which comes when when you get out of the van to put the mail in the mailboxes, is very relaxing. Kind of meditative, really. It doesn't have the same buzz as driving around the deserted highways in Once Human and the Lake radio station, which plays as you drive, doesn't feature as many good tunes but altogether it's a chill experience.
As you go around your route, you have to deliver some parcels along with the letters and parcels have to be handed to someone or else dropped on the porch if no-one's there. That leads to numerous conversations, many of which are very engaging. The dialog is good, the voice acting is strong and the stories are engaging. Those conversations in the course of her work, plus the others shes has in the evenings, make up the core of the gameplay.
The other way it diverges from basic visual novel territory is that it's very much one of those "choices matter" games. There are multiple branching narratives. Most of them seem to revolve around Meredith's career, her love life and her plans for the future. She meets old friends she hasn't seen for decades, flirts and gets flirted with, does people favors, sorts out problems and generally becomes enmeshed in the kind of small-town life I have to assume she left home to get away from.
I had the impression she appreciated the time away from her stressful job in New York but that the pace of small town life was never going to compensate for the buzz of the big city. That was my take and that's how I played her.
By the end, though, I got the distinct impression the writers were strongly hoping I'd realize that Meredith had had enough of the competitive world of software development and was yearning for the quieter, simpler life of a rural mail-carrier. She might even want to settle down with some bearded guy straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel so she'd be back home, close to her childhood best friend and her aging mom and dad.
None of which appealed to me in the slightest, let alone seemed like realistic choices Meredith would make. This is a woman in her forties, working in software development in the 1980s, for a company with a new product that she believes has huge potential. She's clearly in the right place at the right time. Why would she walk away from any of it?
It's true that she's obviously over-worked and it seems for a while that she might also be under-valued. During her two week working vacation she takes numerous calls from her boss back in New York, who seems to think she's still on the job while she's on vacation.
But then he gets the funding, thanks in great part to her efforts and he calls her, tells her the money is there and offers her a huge rise in pay and a partnership in the company to stay on and do the job she's already doing. She's going to throw all that in to drive her dad's mail truck around a big lake for the rest of her life? I don't think so!
Nor is she going to settle down with the lumberjack (He literally is a lumberjack. It's not a metaphor. The first tiem she meets him, he's up a tree!). Leave aside their obvious incompatibility, he has a failed marriage behind him that he's obviously not over yet and professes his love for her after a single date, chasing her down in his car as she's leaving town and forcing her over to the side of the road so he can make his pitch. I only let her believe she was going to stay in touch so she could get to the damn airport alive.
Other possibilities include shacking up with the irritable and incompetent owner of the video store or hitting the road in a beat-up hippiemobile with a teenage runaway for a sidekick....
Okay, I may have slightly misrepresented that last option. Not by much, though.
What I ended up doing was being nice to everyone, leaving them all feeling happy they'd been able to reconnect with an old friend and confident it wouldn't be so long before she came back to visit them again. And then I got the hell out of Providence Oaks.
Maybe if you do work in software development in a big city, as perhaps the people who wrote and designed this game do, the idea of giving it all up for the idyllic life of small-town service operative might seem like some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. Not to me it doesn't. Postman Pat isn't a documentary. Delivering the mail is low-paid, low skill labor, even if the scenery is pretty. And it's not even that pretty when it rains, which it does all the time.
Makes for a great game, though. I highly recommend it. Also, I'm sure it has excellent replayability for those who like that sort of thing. There are so many decision points there must be many possible outcomes. I'll settle for my ending being the good one. It certainly felt good to me.
And finally, there's the Easter Egg. It's the biggest I've ever seen in a game. Huge.
I've left it to the end so as to avoid spoiling the surprise and I suggest anyone that's going to play the game stops reading now. Or maybe not because there's every chance most people playing won't even realize they're seeing anything unusual when they get to it.
I apologize in advance if I've already posted about this. I could have sworn I had but I can't find anything even using search on all the obvious keywords, so I'm going to have to assume it was a post I meant to write but never did.
There's a British TV show called The Detectorists. It's written by and stars McKenzie Crook, best known for being in the original version of The Office, Pirates of the Caribbean and for playing Worzel Gummidge in the revival of that show. As you might guess from the title, it's a show about people whose hobby is finding buried treasure with metal detectors. Or at least, that's the dream. Mostly they find old cans and buttons.
You need that background to appreciate the Easter Egg. Here's how I found it.
Meredith was driving her mail van along one of the outer roads around the lake one day when I happened to notice there was someone standing right in the middle of the huge field of wheat on the right-hand side. I thought it was a scarecrow at first but I was curious because I was pretty sure it hadn't been there the last time I drove by, so I pulled over to the side of the road and Meredith got out.
She walked all the way out to the figure which, as she got closer, revealed itself not to be a scarecrow but a lanky fellow with a metal detector. As I saw his face I felt like I recognized him but obviously it couldn't be...
And then he spoke and it was. In the middle of a field, apparently with no relevance to either the gameplay or the location whatsoever, stood a character with no business being in the game at all. The character's name is Andy. Andy Stone, is who McKenzie Crook plays in the show.
Just in case there was any doubt, Meredith chatted to Andy for a good while and the whole conversation refers to things that happen in The Detectorists. Later in the game, on her final day, he turned up again, just wandering across the parking lot of the motel where she's pulled in to deliver a package. I believe he can just wander into a few other locations. too.
And none of this has any connection whatsoever to the story. It's just there. One of the oddest, most unlikely and also most memorable things I've happened across in any game, ever. How or why it came about is a mystery but I'm very happy it did.
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