Lake from Whitethorn Games and Gamious is a peaceful game in which you’ll follow Meredith Weiss on her two weeks vacation from the big city back into her hometown in Providence Oaks, Oregon. Check our Lake review!
It’s September 1, 1986. You take on the role of forty-something Meredith Weiss, who returns from the big city to her quiet hometown. She exchanges her busy career at a software company to fill in for her dad, the local mail carrier.
During her two-week stay in beautiful Providence Oaks, Oregon, she runs into a few familiar faces as well as plenty of new folks. As Meredith, you get to decide who to talk to, who to befriend, and perhaps even start a romantic relationship with.
Lake from Whitethorn Games and Gamious is a peaceful game in which you’ll follow Meredith Weiss on her two weeks vacation from the big city back into her hometown in Providence Oaks, Oregon. Meredith Weiss left her hometown 22 years ago to study at a University and get a job in the application development sector. She’s been working overtime for all of labor day weekend, and now she’s up for a two-week vacation back in her hometown to take over his father’s post office man while he’s on vacation in Florida.
One of the things I loved right off the bat was how peaceful Providence Oaks is. The places you’ll explore are beautiful and amazingly well-rendered, and the city looks recognizable. The lake is also beautiful to look at. Since you’ll spend the next two weeks delivering mail to the village’s citizens, you’ll eventually get to know the locations by heart and will even be able to navigate them without a map.
The game takes place in early September of 1986, and the main gameplay loop will take you around the small village lake in your mail delivery truck and sometimes chatting to the citizens, doing some small side-quests, or even dating one of them. You’ll deliver letters and packages to different addresses, which changes every day. The base gameplay got repetitive towards the end of the two weeks, but at least there were many people to talk to. The game is also relatively slow to play out. Running is slightly faster than walking, and I figured out way too late that some conversations can be skipped in the options menu (do keep in mind to activate it!), so a typical day in the game will last around 20-30 minutes, and the whole game should last you around 8 hours or so.
The game was reminiscent of Life is Strange since it’s narrated. As for the presentation, the environments are gorgeous, very colorful, and there’s a lot of detail. The game’s resolution did feel low, and you’ll surely notice when the truck moves that it could have used some anti-aliasing to blur the edges. The lighting, in particular, was very impressive. When you begin your day, the sun is low, and the dynamic lighting is good that you can determine the time of the day just by watching the shadows and the general brightness. On the PlayStation 5, there’s a little pop-in when you’re going in your truck at a higher speed, but nothing major. The voice acting was also great, and each character’s voice was very fitting. I liked chatting with new residents and taking life lightly during those two weeks. The soundtrack was also great as you’ll be listening to the local radio in the vehicle.
This game was almost without any issue, but I did run into a couple of problems. When looking at the map after the console went into sleep mode, the map cursor was really slow, which was fixed by rebooting the game. There was a more important one when I was unable to pick up packages in the truck – which happened twice – and it seems that saving and rebooting the game once again did the trick to fix this problem, but this is one that the dev team can probably fix by way of a patch.
The trophy list is short and composed of only 11 Gold trophies that can be earned to unlock a Platinum. The game is available on both the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 as separate releases, with each one having separate trophy lists. All of the trophies are hidden, and they are almost all missable, so take note that you will need a guide – we recommend this guide – if you want to achieve the Platinum in a single run. There are multiple choices to answer in various conversations, and selecting the wrong one in any of the important conversations will lock you out of the Platinum trophy. You can make manual saves and roll back to it as needed, so do use them often because rollbacking to half an hour earlier to select a different choice is never fun.
Lake is a great game and one that surprised me in many aspects, namely the game’s visual engine and how fun it was delivering the mail and interacting with the different characters. I loved driving around the lake, and this is a game that is easy to recommend to players looking for a different experience. If you are a trophy hunter, take note that almost all of the trophies are highly missable. Lake is available on PlayStation 5 at a $19.99 price.
You can purchase Lake on the PlayStation Store for a $19.99 asking price.
Disclaimer
This Lake review is based on a PlayStation copy provided by Whitethorn Games.
