Growing up rural as an electronics-inclined person isn’t easy. You’re in an environment where, typically, people aren’t nearly as interested in screens and wires and up/down speeds. The big events and major players feel like a world away, and it’s easy to grow bitter over this. You see how often a Hallmark-style romcom extols the virtues of where you live, but they sanitize and glamorize it to a ludicrous extent.
Not Lake though. Gamious’ experimental adventure game is more than just a playable Hallmark movie – it’s a frank examination of that sort of life, for good and ill.
Lake centers on Meredith Weiss, a programmer in 1986 who’s taking time off of her latest software development gig to fill in for her mailman dad in her hometown. How that return visit goes is up to the player, to a startling extent. Going by the game’s trailer, you might expect it to be purely a low-key mailman simulator, but you have a fair amount of agency over Meredith’s life.
As Meredith, you can be incredibly rude and stand-offish with everyone, or the nicest person in town. Meredith’s journey is to your preference; the fate of the world isn’t at stake, but who she becomes is. Do you keep your IT job or choose to become a mailman full-time? Do you patch up an old friendship or burn that bridge for good? What would be minor sidequests in a bigger game are the foundations of Lake. Depending on how you go about things, the entire story is one big sidequest before Meredith moves on to bigger challenges.
Opportunities over Meredith’s two week work-vacation abound. The more you engage with them, the more unexpected connections happen. Stay isolated, and your time in the town of Providence Oaks will be just as brief. Yet no matter how you engage with it, Lake makes you come face to face with all the rural living archetypes. The nosy, cranky old lady who loves to be passive-aggressive while insisting she’s always right; a family-owned diner making do with limited customers and aging owners; not to mention a lonely town film nerd, a socially awkward lumberjack and a young kid aspiring to get out of this small-time town to build herself into something bigger.
Oh, and also two drug users on the run and a coworker mailman possibly running an illegal betting ring through the mail system. Once again, Gamious uses its sedated visuals to surprise you with the sort of small town grey areas folks hear about. Even the way people talk to Meredith about her IT job is pitch perfect, with people both brushing it aside or asking impossibly vague questions. All the charm of living out in the woods is there, paired with every rough spot and eccentricity.
It’s possible to really help the town come together, or to run right back to the city. This is most strongly embodied by the two romantic interests – Angie and Robert. Angie’s the local film buff struggling to make ends meet with her rental store in a town where most people just aren’t that excited by VHS yet. Robert’s a lumberjack concerned about encroaching commercialization while being terrible at talking to people. Over time, each is clearly going in a different direction, and Meredith has to choose.
There’s something particularly fascinating here in the metatextual nature of their roles. A queer relationship with Angie in the 80s would be incredibly progressive and risky, even in this more idealized version of the 80s where neither racism nor homophobia appear in the script. It’s still framed as the more daring choice – one with greater risk but also more potential for more excitement.
By contrast, Robert is much safer and low-maintenance. He’s the hetero-normative easy way out. He’s not going to challenge Meredith, but he’s comfortable and some might prefer that, even if he doesn’t match an ideal. Like with Meredith’s job, the question is of preference – weighing risk and reward for every outcome.
This is also a refreshing instance of a game where other characters have agency. They aren’t all standing at the ready for you to tell them what to do. You aren’t Commander Shepard or Geralt of Rivia. You’re just a person they know – someone as flawed and uncertain as they are. Pair that with how mundane yet hazy your day-to-day job feels with casual social interactions, and it’s easy to imagine Providence Oaks as a real place. One that’s so gorgeous – especially the game’s titular lake – that it’s easy to just enjoy the scenery. For however many subplot dramas and comedies play out, life out in Providence Oaks is happy to meet you halfway if you’ll do the same.
Speaking as someone who spent an inordinate amount of time living far enough off the tracks to give Google Maps a headache, Lake is refreshingly genuine. It neither worships nor condemns this sort of life. Given its low key presentation and simple mechanics, it would’ve been reasonable to assume the story wouldn’t be so in-depth. However, the pleasant surprise gives many a glimpse of rural America. With a free demo available on Steam, it’s a trip I heartily recommend worth taking.
