Lake (PlayStation 5) review "There was something here but, unfortunately, the developers proved out of their depth. "

I really wanted to like Lake.

Set in 1986, players take control of Meredith Weiss as she returns from the big city to her (fictional) hometown, Providence Oaks, Oregon. Needing a break from her job as a superstar at the forefront of the personal computer revolution, she volunteers to work her father’s mail route while her parents are out of town on a vacation of their own. Meredith is handed the keys to the mail truck and it’s on us to deliver mail and packages to the residents of her lakeside hometown.

Taking place over a two week period, you begin each morning at the post office before hopping into the truck and making deliveries around town. There’s a handy map to help you navigate between a few neighborhoods and most days, you’ll be tasked to deliver a dozen or so parcels to the townsfolk, dropping a letter into a mailbox or a package onto the front door step before moving on to the next one. Providence Oaks is a small downtown with a few two story buildings, a few neighborhoods of single-family homes, a roadside hotel and diner, and a lot of forests and open roads.

It’s quiet and solitary work, but you do meet some of Meredith’s neighbors as you make deliveries. You’ll get to know Mildred, a cat lover who can’t help but treat her feline friends with cupcakes, quite well. Meredith gets quite the surprise when she makes a delivery to her childhood best friend, Kay, who is still harboring a lot of resentment toward Meredith for leaving her behind. She also gets to know a couple of newcomers to the town (or at least, people who’ve arrived since she left), Angie and Robert, with whom Meredith can pursue romantic relationships (we love our bisexual queens, don’t we folks?).

The premise - delivering mail as a way to encourage exploration of a town and the people who live there - is a good one, but unfortunately, Lake is extremely shallow. There isn’t much to do outside of delivering the mail and your interactions with the residents of Providence Oaks are superficial at best. You deliver the mail and then you go home. While home, Meredith can choose to work, watch a movie, or read a book. Select one and you’ll see a small scene with her banging away at a keyboard, sitting in front of the television, or reading a few pages of a trashy romance novel, but none of it is particularly compelling.

Meredith makes plans on a few of her fourteen nights in Providence Oaks, but these too prove undercooked. She goes on a date with your chosen paramour, but you’ll only be treated to the car ride home after, and throughout the experience, you’re provided almost no opportunity to build a relationship that you as the player will care about. A local fisherman takes Meredith onto his boat to spend time on the lake that Providence Oaks is built around, but we as the player don’t actually go on the boat with them - when she boards the boat, the screen fades to black, and the next time we see her, she’s getting off the boat.

When you do get a chance to actually interact with the other characters in the game, the conversations are extremely stilted, overly formal, and because we have no real relationship with anyone, hollow. Lake offers the illusion of dialogue choice, but these choices have no impact on the outcomes of the game or even most conversations. The game offers multiple endings, but which one you see only comes down to your choices in the final fifteen minutes, which take place during an open mic night at a Providence Oaks diner. I had to complete the section three different times to get all of the endings (there’s a very easy platinum trophy to be had here) and when prompted, I selected different dialogue choices each time and more times than not, the responses to my different inputs were identical.

And that’s really the problem with Lake - there’s just nothing here. Lake has a tremendous premise and a great art style, but most of its best ideas that are poorly executed. The storyline has a lot of promise, but it’s not fully developed and clearly doesn’t know what it wants to do.

The story could have been about choosing between small town life and life in the fast lane, but we rarely dip into Meredith’s head to hear what she’s really thinking, and maybe this was intentional to give the player the illusion of agency, but it also means that we’re not invested in her outcomes.

Or the story could have been about the relationship between Meredith and Kay, exploring how we sometimes leave people we love behind and unintentionally hurt in the process, but it never fully commits to this.

Or the story could have been about finding gay love in a rural community in a less accepting time - Oregon’s rural communities are not known to welcome folks who aren’t white and straight even today, let alone during the 1980s - but Angie and Meredith only interact a handful of times.

Or the story could have been how the identities of small towns are impacted by development, how the need to grow and expand endangers the very things that make these places so attractive in the first place.

Or the story could have been … you get the picture.

There’s a great quote from the TV show Parks and Recreation - “never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.” Lake’s developers would have done well to heed this sage advice and simply picked one of these themes to explore instead of underbaking a bunch of different ideas. Narrative adventures like Journey or Life is Strange or the more recently released Goodbye, Volcano High are loved because we develop emotional relationships with the characters. Forming emotional relationships with any character in Lake can’t be done - it’s just too vapid as it bounces from one idea to the next.

I really wanted to like Lake. The premise and setting are fertile ground for a rich, impactful experience. It had a ton of potential and I am frustrated that it didn’t rise to meet it. There was something here but, unfortunately, the developers proved out of their depth.

Community review by justjess (October 03, 2023) Jessica Wadleigh writes creative non-fiction from Portland, Ore. She runs zines + things, a literary zine press publishing thirty titles. You can find more of Jessica's work online at zinesandthings.com or @zinesandthings on Instagram.