There are some games where, while I like the look of them, the timing has to be right before I buy them.
That may sound a little odd, but occasionally I have to be in the mood to pick up a certain game, or the stars have to align in a certain way before I pull the trigger and pay my money.
In the case of Lake here, we’d just celebrated my significant others 51st birthday and the meal had been sumptuous… but less than I’d expected… so in my eyes there was money there that had already “been spent” that I could now spend on something else… Lake.
Not expensive and in a New Year sale, most importantly though was that is was a physical copy… one I would be able to sell on once I’d finished with it.
Now it becomes the first game of the year for Indie Fest…
January 9th
First play… I like the graphical style I can say that much, some of the animation is a little off, Meredith herself walks like she’s desperately trying not to soil herself, or already has, and while there is a button you can hold down to “walk faster” it doesn’t seem to make much difference to her speed.
Some of the scenery is a little rough around the edges, road markings are all straight lines which look odd when you see the lines down the sides of the roads on corners, and even though this doesn’t look like it should be that hard to run on PS5 hardware there are some issues with textures popping in on long drives.
It’s at this point I decide to award games points for how polished they seem to be, while for the most part it all runs smoothly when you get in the delivery van there is a split second when the camera has a fit and you seem to be hovering in mid air before you drive off.
When I first started there was no other traffic anywhere on the roads, next delivery day and no matter where I parked there would be a tailback behind me that seemed incapable of going around me, dodgy AI to the point where, having driven off and delivered elsewhere, the cars were still there when I went back to that part of the town minutes later… why, in one instance, a huge truck would go down one of the smaller side streets and get stuck turning back into the main road.
Early days here, but I feel this is a game that would have benefitted by being bigger, at most you’re delivering 7 or 8 items a day, so why the huge post van?
Bonus points are being awarded for the reference to the British TV show The Detectorists with a cameo from MacKenzie Crook in character, which offers a nice Gold Trophy just for talking to him and discovering that little easter egg… it’s here where I decide I can add a few points at the end for random events.
But… if I had paid full whack for this at launch, I’d feel a little cheated, while I still believe that at £9.95 for the physical release on PS5 the price was too high, I know I can sell it on once I’m down… it’ll launch on Ebay soon enough, it’s not a long game by any shakes and the 13 page guide included 2 large maps and over a page of explanation and controls.
It’s times like these that I start to appreciate Gamepass when it comes to playing small indie titles.
January 11th
This being the first game I’ve played for Indie Fest, the scoring system is still flexible… I’ve added criteria, reduced the impact of others… I decide to introduce a “difficulty” score… 10 being just right, 1 being way too hard/easy… this is added then reduced to a score out of 5 as 10 seems to add too much importance to it.
I also, as I near the end of the game, decide to include a score for characters… there are some great characters here, and some really annoying ones… scored out of 5 again.
For games where the category of characters doesn’t apply, non-story games for example, it will be simply left out of the score calculation.
I work through the rest of the game, some more polish rubs off as the clipping becomes more noticeable… a couple of times I press the doorbell and Meredith pushes a random spot on the wall, and then leaves the package partially inside a bench or a counter top… there are also times when a character is talking and their lips aren’t moving.
Story wise it all sort of fizzles out, side stories either end in a disappointing manner or don’t end… your Post Office boss is being investigated for using the system to illegally bet on sports, but comes back 2 days later saying he threatened legal action against the boss and everything has been sorted… the romance option I followed only concludes if you choose to drive off into the sunset in a Camper Van… if you go back to the big city or choose to stay you don’t see and ending here.
It's a shame as the game starts out so well, but trails off at the end… rushed, or just lack of a decent ending to a novel idea?
Summary & Score
In retrospect this was the perfect first game… it sets a good bench mark that I can, and will, judge other games this year by, it doesn’t tax the player with anything complicated other than picking which package from the back of the van is the right one for that property, and it’s possible to even have the driving done for you, so it works well as a story where the player nudges it in the directions it wants you to take alongside the main story… I enjoyed my time with the game.
It could have been more polished, there could have been more tunes on the local radio (every time I’d turn it on it was the same one playing) and it could have been a little longer… but these are minor quibbles… it feels like a solid game without being brilliant… worth picking up in a sale with a hefty discount.
Indie Fest Score – 67%