Lake - Review

Review by Brine. Game for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, the video game was released on 01/09/2021

Video games can transport us to fantastic worlds, make us live incredible adventures thanks to a joypad that we certainly could not replicate in real life, giving us adrenaline and crazy emotions or putting us in front of arduous but very satisfying challenges. Sometimes, however, they come titles like Lake, which objectively have little of the fantastic, but can offer a relaxing pastime and pleasant, offering us a glimpse of life without too many jolts, exploring places and everyday situations. And this is indeed both the strong and the weak side of the Gamious and White Horn Digital game, a "postman" simulator set in the beautiful landscapes of the American Northwest, in that Oregon already seen in games such as Alan Wake, Days Gone and the equally peaceful Gone Home, with its forests, its wooden houses and, in particular in this case, its bodies of water.



Lake - Review

In Lake, adventure currently available on PC and Xbox, as mentioned, we will accompany Meredith for a few hours, a career woman who in the mid-80s will temporarily abandon her stressful job in an IT company to spend two weeks in her hometown of Providence Oaks, replacing her father who has just gone retired in his postman job. Meredith has never delivered letters in her life, but she knows the city inside out, even if many things have changed in the 26 years that have seen her away from home and she is pleased to offer to break the routine by bringing letters and packages to her old men. and new fellow citizens.

You've Got Mail


There is no sensational twist around the corner, there are no complex mechanics, timers and scores, there are only a decidedly repetitive work, many beautiful landscapes and a story just hinted at that talks about nostalgia, love and the little everyday things, with a hint of dating sim. Lake is divided into days; every morning we will be called to reach a list of addresses to deliver the mail, driving around the small town and its surroundings in an old van. While most deliveries won't see us interacting with NPCs, the core of the experience and "story" - if we want to call it that - will unravel around that handful of bizarre characters who will be so talkative that they will stop and talk curiously to the new postwoman and will turn them against their own problems or chores to attend to.


Lake - Review

These conversations, complete with multiple responses and crossroads, will give a minimum of variety to a repetitive gameplay loop by design, offering us some optional secondary missions, such as when we will have to look for a cure for an old lady's slightly sick cat or by going on a date with one of Meredith's potential partners. Nothing that honestly turns into nothing more than a few more cutscenes or additional details on the protagonists, but still welcome moments other than the usual "routine" of driving and delivery (with among other things the usual 3-4 unknown country songs in repeat on the radio). It's a pity that the character models and especially their expressions fail to do justice to the discreet dubbing: really ugly.


Xbox One Users: Look elsewhere

Where Lake's independent origins are then felt dramatically, significantly lowering our judgment, is in the game's performance, at least in the Xbox One version we tested, unfortunately at the limit of acceptable / playable. Lake is also handsome to look at and with a pastel art style that really makes a lot of it in the screenshots, but at least on the console of the past generation of Microsoft he suffers from problems of all kinds, not only in the frame-rate (and patience, given the relative action at screen), but especially when loading assets and cutscenes from the hard disk. The pop-in is rampant: Virtually any tree more than a few meters away from the truck will clumsily load in the background, as will the shadows of the light poles and cables reflecting on the roadway. Given then atmospheric and particle effects of the lowest level regarding water and precipitation, the game is also plagued by several bugs (it rains in the tunnels!).

Lake - Review

The main flaw is once again linked to the uploads: although the game shows loading screens only at the beginning and at the end of the days, almost every single time we finish talking to an NPC or having finished a delivery or even just entering and exiting from the pause menu the game will pause for several seconds, sometimes minutes (!), while the hamster inside the Xbox processes what happens on screen and finally gives us back control over our character. Honestly in 20 years of video game reviews we had never seen such a thing. If you have a next-gen or PC version the problem is reduced dramatically, but considering that Lake is released on limited platforms (Xbox and PC only) you can't leave millions of players behind with a version at the limit of the playable.



Lake - Review

Sorry, because Lake can remember past experiences with Firewatch or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (without ever reaching the artistic or storytelling heights), giving us very stressed players a good pastime in the midst of challenging Hades runs or Tales of missions. Arise, but its excessive worldliness and above all too many technical flaws make it barely enough, waiting for promised new patches. There is something interesting and relaxing about this Oregon lake, but in this season of masterpieces and pearls on Game Pass, you can safely move on, as the quality of the weave doesn't quite compensate for the lack of action.


► Lake is an Adventure-indie game developed by White Thorn Games and published by Gamious for PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, the video game was released on 01/09/2021

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