Can't say that a temporary scenary change to the countryside doesn't make you all weird, thinking about new things.
Game feel is off.
Love the characters, despite being as surface level as you'd expect from a video game, they all lack depth.
The main thing that sticks here is the mail delivery part, as boring and tiresome as you'd expect it to be, only having these little shiny encounters during your day, a delivery to the diner, being asked by Mildred to help a cat...

The main choice of the game is go back to evil corporate world and make money, stay in PO living a stable life with a shit job but unlike computers you have friends and a nice setting, or fuck off everything and leave with your lesbian cinephile GF in a camping car, choosing it despite the myst in your mind.

Sort things out, make choices, feel time, turmoil of emotions.
Lake stays on the surface but lack depth and a clearer direction.

"Video games are supposed to be fun" - the motel clerk in Lake, whose name I never learned

I feel that boiling games down to purely "was it fun?" is a bit of a reductive stance... but when Lake itself said it, it distracted me. I wasn't having fun. And all told, while my favorite games are generally constantly active things like Mario or Doom, I do have quite a soft spot for small experimental titles that revel in their own weird quirks... but Lake wasn't clicking at all. And while the hotel clerk isn't even remotely presented as a likable character (at least as far as I spoke with him), his annoying griping struck at the heart of the biggest issue I was having with the game; even being down to see what it has to offer, I wasn't having any fun engaging with this game.

There's a moment near the end of Lake where you go up to a secluded cabin in the woods and deliver a package. An annoyed voice complains about you disturbing his writing process, and you have a back and forth with this pretentious author. After all, he's the one who ordered a package in the first place, what right does he have to complain about it being delivered? You drop that on him before leaving to do the rest of your route as he awkwardly gives a half-assed apology and goes back to writing his Alan Wake story. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen more often in Lake, mundane but mildly amusing encounters with random locals, but there's really only two or three moments like this throughout the game. We get plenty of setup for fun moments, too, but they're often just left hanging. In particular I'm thinking of what I assume is meant to be an Evil Dead joke, where you deliver a giftwrapped chainsaw to an abandoned rundown cabin. That was a moment where it felt like something could have happened, be it a spooky musical sting or maybe Meredith saying "groovy", anything at all. It was a complete softball to setup a punchline, and instead you simply knock on the door, Meredith has a voiceline expressing confusion that nobody is answering (??????), and you leave the item and go. Even something like Meredith asking why there's a delivery to an abandoned house would have been SOMETHING, but for my playthrough she remained silent as she does after leaving any package at the door. That's the majority of your deliveries, being done to relative silence - the best you can hope for is a few randomly selected canned responses from Meredith that you'll get tired of hearing. Otherwise, they're simply a means to force an interaction with an established character in the cast. In principle this isn't even really a bad thing, after all it's kind of what I knowingly signed up for, unfortunately I didn't find the locals to be even remotely compelling. The little moments just aren't really something that the game is interested in delivering despite feeling like the obvious thing to pack this game to the brim with, because what Lake thinks it's meant to be about is big meaningful moments to drastically change Meredith's life instead of smaller moments that make life feel more vibrant.

Where I find Lake particularly confusing is that the general concept is hard to swallow. Meredith has been away from home for 22 years, and she is 40 years old. She's apparently got enough of a good relationship with her parents that it's easy for her to spend her vacation house-sitting and substituting for her dad at his job so he can go on vacation instead, but she also hasn't been back here once for over half of her lifespan. It's almost a bit ridiculous how long a time she has been gone, and the way her parents and neighbors talk to her makes it feel like she's supposed to be younger, but instead she's middle-aged and with a well established job that she's eager to bring up and talk about with others. It's very clear that Meredith is proud of her job at Addit. The game then spends a good portion of its runtime trying to tear down her independence at her tech job, essentially saying "return to an idyllic small town away from a corporate tech job to regain your soul". And what's weird is that they could absolutely build up Meredith having some nostalgia for the town with some flavor text, but she only has around two or three nostalgic remarks and as a result it makes the idea of her even wanting to move back very difficult to sell. I remember her saying something about having her first kiss at the campground, but aside from that she didn't have much to muse about and it made her feel disinterested in being home. When she is offered to take her dad's job and her parent's house permanently, if you do not show interest her parents are taken aback and offended; frankly that interaction was kind of a harrowing moment. The game was pretty clear in its messaging that it felt that was not the right choice, but what it tries to say with that is that she should simply fall over and allow her parents to thrust her into a permanent change to her life because they're having a great time being drunks in Florida. Honestly, no wonder Meredith hasn't been home in 22 years if that's what she had to deal with for her first time back, and they act as if having a 20% stake in a company that's about to make millions of dollars off of her dedicated work is some silly impetuous whim. Listen - I'm not someone that's super motivated by seeking profit and personal gain, but it's absolutely jarring to have your mom scold you like a teenager for being on the ground floor of something like Apple because you're not jazzed about a bait and switch plot to move you back to a dead end place you've spent the majority of your life avoiding!

And speaking of changing up your life, there's romance in this game. I opted to seek out neither romance route simply because I found both of them to be almost too painfully telegraphed as romantic interests. That's not really fair to Lake, but it just didn't feel natural for me so I opted to simply not engage that way - I called them both as love interests off of their very first sentences and I was right. Props to Lake for some bisexual representation here by having an option for Meredith to go either way, but I wasn't feeling either of them and opted to just be a professional upstanding postal worker and go about my business politely. Even with that behavior though, you'll get Angie calling you "babe" as if you've been flirting with her too, and you'll get Maureen telling you that Robert has a double meaning with "trying to keep pretty things in PO". It's nice that there are dialogue options to try to blow people off, but it really doesn't matter and it often doesn't feel like what you say has any impact at all upon the characters and their interactions. It feels like the game thinks you're pursuing romance with your every interaction until the point where those plotlines end, and that sure does get a bit uncomfortable feeling at times when either Robert or Angie are clearly angling at you despite showing no reciprocation.

And speaking of Lake ignoring your inaction, your actions never have any consequences. The crazy cat lady wants you to help her with her sick cat? Doesn't matter if you don't! I mean, I'm glad the cat didn't die, but I said no (I'm the postman, I have work to do, you clearly have a car right there in your driveway lady) and it made no difference. I said no to hanging out with the hippies who I spoke to twice, both times incredibly brief encounters, and yet I was still forced to go say goodbye to them and listen to the guy's bad singing while they passed around a blunt - if ever there was an encounter I wanted to not do, it was this one. Hell, I'm actually just surprised that there weren't more events that I was forced to do like that. One such event I thought would be a shoo-in for a forced encounter, if you don't help Robert save the town from new apartments (who are they going to put into those apartments??? we're in the middle of nowhere and have a tiny population, who are we renting to?), he will still succeed at rallying the town to stave off the construction. If you do or don't help Angie with her movie rental store, it will always fail and she will always leave... and honestly I'm surprised that you even had the option to say no to helping her, she wanted you to do deliveries and that's what the game is all about. Most egregiously, your boss at Addit will repeatedly pester you to do work off the clock to help ensure their multi-million dollar deal goes through - I blew him off every single time he asked and not only did the deal still go through, I was still offered a huge stake in the company too. You can simply sleepwalk through Lake, never once engaging with anything, and your inaction doesn't matter. I was cordial but distant to Meredith's former best friend Kay (I'm shocked at how abrupt her storyline is, I was expecting a more natural moment for them to reconnect and it didn't really happen), and after days of being treated the way you would treat an inoffensive customer at a retail job she just decides that you're still her best friend and she'll go asking you favors and being super chatty all the time. She asked me to babysit her kids so she could go see Journey, and I didn't - she still ended up seeing Journey anyhow. Your actions don't matter, aside from whoever you choose to kiss or where you decide to go in the end. You can even be kinda rude to most people and you'll still get a radio sendoff where the town says they'll miss you if you leave town at the end.

Probably the strangest plotline in the game for me is the bit with Frank and his gambling addiction. The man is using his federal job to run an illegal gambling ring to better himself. The postmaster general gives you a threatening phone call to do postal policies correctly, and then shows up in town to ask about Frank. I actually completely spilled the beans about Frank, saying that yeah, he's misusing his position and doing some kinda corrupt shit. Listen, I don't WANT to acquiesce to the police like that, but honestly yeah Frank was kind of a shitty person for using his job to do that kind of stuff so I figured screw it, let him have some consequences for abuse of his position. Frank is then suspended for a single day, and the postmaster general immediately gives up with the provided reasoning that he didn't wanna talk to the crazy cat lady again and that Frank has some lawyer friends who scared him off. What do you MEAN this backwoods doofus has lawyers who got the federal government off of his back when he was in the wrong? The game even tries to portray Frank as the hero who is in the right here! Come on man, misuse of federal funds and shit like that, why do you want me to root for Brett Favre?

What I'm left with in Lake is a game that feels like it wasted my time. I didn't like the cast, and frankly that's all the game was really about - without that, it's nothing. The gameplay loop is to walk slowly (hold down a button to walk 1% faster), drive a clunky unresponsive van, and fight the map with its icons that rarely feel like they're in the right place for most houses. You'll chat to some locals, and if you aren't interested in them you have nothing to latch onto. The sound effects often broke, I'd constantly see massive 8 car pileups happen entirely on their own in random spots on the road, there's about 3 songs on the radio, and when I finished the game the credits song didn't even play. Maybe that's because I did what the writers clearly felt was the bad ending? It's hard to tell whether that was intentional or not when so many other things broke so frequently, but it did lead off the credits with the name of the song so I doubt that was the point. This game wants so badly to have the vibes of Life is Strange, but all I could feel the whole playthrough was how much I wish the town could be the setting of a successor to Deadly Premonition instead of what it is. It's a shame, because I wanted to find something in this game, but I felt unfulfilled the whole adventure. I guess the answer was to simply just not go back home.

Lake is a game set in the 80s and is about a woman who has gotten fed up with life at a programming firm in a big city and has the opportunity to take over her dad’s old job as a postal worker for two weeks. Throughout her stay, her interactions with people will help her decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

The gameplay is very simple: you deliver letters and parcels. You drive to a location, drop of a letter in a letterbox or take a parcel from the back. Sometimes there’s nobody there, but other times you strike up a conversation. There are some interesting individuals like a lumberjack who wants to save the countryside from apartments, your old childhood friend and a woman who is trying to run a video rental store but is struggling as not enough people have a VCR at home.

There’s no time limit, you just drive around at your own pace and return to the post office when finished. It probably sounds boring, but it actually comes across as really relaxing, there’s a certain charm to the whole game: just like the “holiday” as a postal worker is to the main character, the game is just a nice change of pace for the person playing.

The passion Gamious had in making this game jumps off the screen. The characters have personality and realness to them. Every character has multiple sets of clothing they wear throughout the two weeks this game takes place in. There are so many dialogue choices and all of them have impact on how the characters see you and behave towards you.

Playing this game felt like a warm hug and constant coziness, even when some darker topics were touched upon.
I loved the gameplay. I never knew delivering mail could be so fun. The game could have gone on for much longer and I would have been a happy girl.

It wasn't all rainbows and paradise, though. The music on the radio got repetitive and so did delivering the mail after two weeks of doing just that. I think it could have been made even more fun with more events interspersed. I know that's not how real mail delivery goes, but in terms of a video game, it'd have helped break the monotony of driving the same route and putting mail in the mailbox to the same couple lines of dialogue.

The one thing that frustrated me was that Meredith couldn't run. You can hold Shift to make her walk faster but it barely did anything. It made me want to drive the truck everywhere and not walk at all.

There are some little points that could have been improved, but in the end, this game is an absolute gem. And by a Dutch developer which was fun to find out afterwards (I'm Dutch!). I'm excited to play the Christmas DLC, even though it's not Christmas anymore.

Esse jogo curou minha depressão.

Uma experiência honesta e que me cativou pelos personagens muito carismáticos.

Uma simplicidade singular.

Repetitivo
Um bom jogo para relaxar e apenas entregar suas cartas por aí, e só isso, apesar de ser bem curto (±4h) fazer essa entrega por 14 dias acaba sendo enjoativa, existe algumas histórias dos moradores locais mas bem fracas e não são capazes de prender a atenção.
Ambientação desse jogo é maravilhosa e a soundtrack é muito boa, porém, novamente um ponto repetitivo, acredito que sejam no máximo 5 músicas e a própria rádio brinca com isso.
Por fim, os bugs são um charme a parte e a parte mais cômica do game.

David’s 30 Platinum Trophies Before Turning 30

2/30

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: As close to perfection as one can get.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5: Excellence incarnate.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Amazing experience.
⭐️⭐️⭐️.5: Good game.
⭐️⭐️⭐️: Fun enough to be worth your time.
⭐️⭐️.5: Missed the mark in a considerable amount of elements.
⭐️⭐️: A trudge towards progress/completion.
⭐️.5: A great deal of regrets playing this.
⭐️: Truly disappointing.
.5: Kudos to anyone with a shred of bother.

The above rating descriptions pertain strictly to the overall rating after taking into consideration the elements below, for which I’ll still employ a five-point rating to get an average afterwards.

Graphics: 3 - Pretty okay for something cartoonish, detailed enough, and the colours pop.

Gameplay: 1 - Tedious, and the ability to “run” is like a slap to the face.

Audio: 1.5 - I appreciate the voice acting and the original (?) soundtrack (which is considerably lacking in terms of options), but anything else doesn’t help the game’s case.

Replay Value: 0.5 - There are three endings as implied by the trophy list. That should have been enough to signal the inclusion of the ability to skip cutscenes. Not only that, there are dialogue options that force you to watch over them again.

Story: 1 - Potentially interesting characters that are disappointingly not fleshed out for a chance to hold this game together even at the slightest bit, but hey, as the main character, they truly are side characters as if in real life: ready to be discarded at a moment’s notice.

Overall: 1.4 - I may not want to go back to this lake.