Lake

Lake is everything my favorite game would be. This game is story-driven, has solid mechanics, a full cast of characters, and a day-and-night system. What I just described would have been my favorite game from 2004. Lake lays out all its cards within the first two days of game time: you drive, you deliver, you drive, you talk and deliver, you drive, you go home and talk, lather, rinse, and repeat. I had been looking forward to Lake since it was announced in the middle of 2020, but the game is so under the radar and underwhelming you won't even find it on a list of Xbox One or Xbox Series games on Wikipedia. I say under the radar, but it wasn't necessarily a small company that was part of its reveal. Inconsequential. Come with me as I divulge to you the lakeside tale of protagonist Meredith Weiss, the most all over the place protagonist I've played in a while. This game is the perfect Game Pass game. Lake is a "wait for a sale" game. While I may have burnt out on Lake halfway through its runtime its developers should be supported so they can take what they've had and then expand on it. As stated in the pitch, Lake has solid mechanics, but those mechanics are both so paper-thin and the mainly only thing you will do for the entire game. This game would have been ruined had the driving mechanic with the mail truck been an absolute chore or felt off on either side of the spectrum. While you might be driving the tightest turning mail truck in the United States, you're not fishtailing everywhere you go. However, you have a driver that will never turn the steering wheel even once. In that mail truck, too, you'll be stuck with the most annoying and lowest-track count radio and soundtrack. If these songs were reminiscent of the actual 80s you'd never believe that bands like Journey, which gets name-checked, or that the Statler Brothers dropped a single or two. Honestly, I don't even know what you'd think; maybe that the radio back then was never used and everyone just drove in silence everywhere lest they hear the same song again. They would hear that song in the store, in the diner, in the movie rental place, or in the mail truck. Nobody had diverse tastes in anything, no. The other thing to note about the driving here is that the protagonist is an absolute mad person behind the wheel as those reverse J-turns we all yearn to nail in a Forza or GTA game are so butter smooth here you'd expect to pick up a side gig as a stuntman. I want to use the following screenshot to make up for my comments about the radio; the video store was a fun 2-minute walkthrough seeing all the spoof titles and movie posters tied to them. 'The Maze' was such a good riff on 'The Labyrinth' that I couldn't leave without a picture of the old movie rental place. These two minutes were also the most fun I would have in this game. I miss movie rental stores. Along with the driving, you're delivering. This isn't Death Stranding, though, so that mail truck I mentioned before is your singular tool and mode of delivery. Map diversity in Death Stranding was great in both terrain and aesthetics but the most diversity you will find in Lake after its first three days is when you finally decide to offroad a bit in the insanely rigged mail truck. Terrain, weather, none of it matters here. Rain is reminiscent of what was seen in the 2021 release for the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Definite Edition, yet the only difference is here it was understanding that game development of weather effects outside of triple-A gaming is likely impossible. There are two package types to drop off: a letter and, well, a package. Letters are dropped in the mailbox, but there are no drivebys allowed here as every time you're forced to get out and make the walk around the truck, drop off the envelope, and then get back in. Packages barely require any more effort other than walking a little farther to ring a doorbell which in the latter half the game doesn't even yield conversations with anyone and Meredith just says, "Guess I'll leave it," as if there is any other option. One in-game day I walked up to a house as the homeowner was driving out of their driveway, yet still engaged with this house as I did every other house that day by knocking, shrugging, and moving onto the next. By day five, you'll have met the entire cast which also means you drove practically everywhere in the meantime. There is maybe one interaction on a different side of the map from that initial work week but don't count it as meaningful as you never drive to that house or hear from that NPC again. Lake has such a small cast of characters that by the end feelings will be formed about all, earned or not. Let's run them down: Cat ladyGeneral Store OwnerOther postal employeePostal manager guyVideo store clerk (romance option)Old friendDiner owner who employs old friendFarmerLumberjack (romance option)Motel Clerk who gets named but will always be captioned as 'Motel Clerk'Random person in a cabin that is never seen before or afterStoner couple living in an RVThe other half of the stoner couple to count people properlyMechanic girl who is oddly always talking about her parents but the parents are never seenMomAnd dad that are only interacted with over the phoneThe in-city boss who insists on calling every couple of nights to ask for company timeWhile there are more characters here than I had initially remembered or wanted to credit, there are 16 characters fully voice-acted characters. Of course, taking into consideration a game of this size from an indie team, that is a cool feat as every one of these characters is interacted with throughout the two-week story period. Yet, it leads off with both Other Postal Employee and Cat Lady, so expectations aren't ever meant to be high. There are two romance options in either the male Lumberjack who lacks any chemistry with Meredith or the female Video Store Clerk that [SPOILER ALERT] dips out halfway through the game and then comes back, in the end, to apologize then kiss and make up. Characters that don't mean anything like the Motel Clerk literally never have their caption title changed even though it is found out his name is Matt; while Matt is a dislikable character his name should have at least been changed to match our own knowledge. There is a very odd plotline involving the Other Postal Employee and gambling that really doesn't amount to much of anything. This is how most of the interactions go: set-up, fizzle out, weak payoff. The biggest shake-ups to the formula of the game are when there are special drop-offs from one resident to another as a favor. It is also set-up that the cat lady may be misfeeding her cats but it is played off for laughs than a moment of opportunity, and this is the same for Other Postal Employee who is not on the up-and-up. Meredith's parents call in every evening to check-in and talk about their Florida while her boss calls in every other other night to talk about the big turns he's making and ask Meredith to work on some things for him. It is these over-the-phone interactions that have the most sway over Meredith's endgame results. There is one other dropped by the stoner couple living in an RV. I don't mean to spoil the game, but I believe it is very evident after a few days in-game days that your options come at the end of the game will be to stay in the lakeside town, head back to the city for the corporate job, then lastly drive out on your own to a mysterious end. In the middle of the game, replaying the last few days to see all endings was enticing, but by the time I reached those final days, I was dead set on wrapping up and seeing credits to finally free up the hard drive space. While the parents phone home every night, none of these interactions open any doors for conversation and mostly end with Dad wanting to go to the bar; interactions with Steve, the boss, if you're doing your job, go as easy as one would assume aside from being mildly annoyed with the week off's interruption. In the end of this story, no matter how much control I had over Meredith, I never felt like anything I, as the player, had any sway over the story. I truly hope there is a final option where Meredith could not work for her boss over the two weeks and get fired to then go home to another job, but I don't feel like this would jive with whatever ideas the writers had. Episodes of your favorite legal drama will stir more emotion than most plotlines found in Lake. Remember the basic mechanics earlier of driving and delivering? There are two more in the form of an arcade game and photography. To start lightly, the arcade game is a serviceable twin-stick shooter that has been in almost any video game that has an in-game playable arcade cabinet. I spent my 20 minutes with it between two separate parts in the game, whatever. Insert: New high score did I break it? Then there is photography which is posed as a favor to the General Store Owner to get into a competition. There are 12 photos with a camera that does not zoom. With the camera, though, I at least had a reason to press the 'Y' button on my controller. Press 'Y' then 'A' to capture then 'Y' to return to the game. Do that twelves times, boom, done. I really did try and take some good photos of the titular Lake and the scenery that surrounded it. However, when I turned in my photos and came back to see them the next day I was met with 12 black photos. At first, I thought okay maybe this is a one-time glitch or a bit of a rib on the General Store Owner for not knowing how to process photos in a dark room. You know, typical old-school humor, right? Wrong. Then there is a prompt to enter one of the twelve photos into a photo competition so then the game returns to the same exact 12 black photographs for me to pick what could potentially be an award winner. The General Store Clerk says I most likely won't win, so what does it matter what my pictures look like anyhow? This was my final straw for this game. Poor mechanics, a photographic pay-off that comes with a glitch, and general weirdness made this game fall flat for me. My wife, who was in the passenger seat of my gameplay mail truck noticed during a drive to some cabins that all the foliage was disappearing. Sure enough, the closer to shrubbery I got the more it would disappear. This is not pop-in, this was pop-out; the closer I got, the more that disappeared. I can get over some glitches but after the bombed photo development I was done. Lake felt not only broken but just old-school. The old-school comparison comes in a big way: finish the in-game day and get rewarded with a cutscene. This is a 14-day game, that's 14 days of rewards by those standards! It is not, though, when the filler is most common over-the-phone conversations but also by the fact that if you ever decide to pop in on anyone unannounced there is a one dialogue scene that does not matter to anything at all, even with romantic partners. Lake tried to push relationships with a small cast but just did not know how to do it outside of those 14 scenes. Whether it was crippled by the in-game calendar and pre-dated end or thought it lived up to it for a happy conclusion is going to be beyond me. I know my friend went with the Lumberjack romantic partner and played through all three ends, and I say 'Huzzah' to that, but Lake did not land with me at all by the end to want to see anything else on offer. What should have been an absolute smash of a title for me turned out to be Lake and its contents that don't spill into any rivers but mainly hits a dam within an hour of playtime. Again, the developers will hopefully continue and nail it on the next run, but, hopefully, by that time there is an actual playtester or somebody to rein in or fill out where needed. For as short as the title is, it feels broken in too many ways or too old of a title to fit in with today's indie story-based titles or the latest walking simulators. When I started this review, I had three stars and then jumped to two, but, in the end, I don't even know if I care enough about Lake to even give it a star-based or numeric rating. I have never felt so pleasantly pissed off about anything as much as Lake.