Lake (Xbox One) - Demo Preview

I enjoy weird games, games that try something new or something a little slower. Lake is a game about being a postman, or as the so-called PC people of the time would call Meredith “Post-lady,” and talking to people you might not have seen in 22 years. Set in a north-western American town, you play as Meredith Weiss, who returned to town after her dad took leave to drink, fish, and gamble. In your return to take up his job, you’ll meet interesting characters and an old woman I wouldn’t mind running over if she asks me to do another thing for her.

Following E3 2021, several storefronts loaded up for a week of demos, and this week I’ve tried Lake. As a short hour-long experience on the Xbox One, you’ll notice two things straight away from it: The demo port is just the PC port, and the performance on the Xbox One can be dire. If consoles are meant to hit a minimum of 30, the Xbox One is hardly hitting 29 frames per second if you are lucky. One thing I do hope for the coming release in September is quite a bit of optimization.

I will say, I do enjoy Lake‘s deliberate and tempered pace, being that of a life of a postman you slowly ponder around town in your little van and on foot. Handing out parcels and putting letters in post-boxes slowly throughout the day. You will often stop for little catch-ups and introductions along the way, as you find your way around town once again and find new neighbors and old friends. That said, some of the pedantries of talking to some do get a bit… annoying? More than once during my hour I had thoughts of killing Mrs. Jenkins, the little old woman with all the cats.

I found others to be interesting, though the roughness of the game made talking feel like it was at an unnatural and clunky pace. It never really let awkwardness happen in what was a natural way, often with gaping pauses between even the most normal of conversation. It made me wish there was a skip button, something I’ll be hoping for after already playing an hour and wanting to pick up the game in September. Though, happily, if you plan to play on the Nintendo Switch – where my biggest concern with performance and lack of optimization lies – you’ll be able to play without volume as you can force subtitles to have a push-to-continue prompt.

All this said, I did find a few rough-looking bugs, as traffic piled up when a van impaled itself on a picket fence. Small things like a lack of sound effects when in the van and speeding down the lakeside also cropped up. Even with the arcade machine in the diner, if you open the map with RB by accident you’ll be kicked from the special camera but not the game you are in. While we’re on it, there is a lack of tutorial to tell you which buttons to use during the Ghost Blasters game. Really, these are minor things compared to the frame rate, but they are note-worthy nonetheless.

From that hour of playing Lake in what is admittedly a very enough looking and feeling demo, I’m not entirely dissuaded by it. I’m hoping for better performance on launch, maybe tighten a few things up like the timing for dialogue and ability to skip and other minor things. For being a game about delivering the post, it might be a little slow and may not grab headlines, but I am excited to see where it is on September 1st later this year on PC and Xbox. I also may want to marry Robert and hug Angie, just as a side note.