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In Lake you play a woman named Meredith while she takes a break from her busy city life and high stress job and returns to the small Oregon lake town she grew up in, Providence Oaks. She temporarily fills a vacancy at the postal office and (re)meets many of its townsfolk.

Gameplay

The gameplay is quite simple. You’re in Providence Oaks for 2 weeks and drive around in a postal van delivering mail and packages. Driving is easy enough and the game forces you to a max speed depending on the road you’re driving on. When you reach a delivery spot you then get out of the van, put stuff in the mailbox or you grab a package and ring the doorbell.
When you’re not spending time walking or driving, you’ll be spending time socializing. This can happen during or after work and is quite limited and is solely story focused. Most social scenes in the game are just you and another NPC stiffly looking and talking at each other with occasional dialogue options.

Story

The story is nothing special but gets the job done. Your character takes a break and spends time as a postal worker. You meet people, sometimes do some stuff for them, get invested in the town and then choose what you want to do. There is only one major choice and there is no high stakes drama going on. It’s a simple story, for a simple town, for a simple game that just wants you to relax for a couple of hours. Which is fine.
Graphics and World Building
The graphics of the game are quite good. It’s all very colorful, happy, bright and does a good job of enhancing the beauty of the lake and its surrounding town and forests. It seems that the devs had quite a passion for the location of the game and it shows ingame. Providence Oaks looks beautiful and homely and the atmosphere is done very well. The game almost makes me want to live in a location just like it.

Music & Sound

The sound of the game is just fine. Neither bad nor exciting. It just gets the job done, however. The music in the game is quite good. Only two songs were composed by the devs and the rest are licensed, though I liked the dev composed song the most. Most songs are fun and fit the setting but it’s a short playlist and eventually you will probably want to turn off the radio in your van.
The voice acting is also done decently. Every character had a decent actor behind it, but since there aren’t any situations ingame where a height of emotion is happening, the actors never really get pushed on that regard.

The Bad

This game doesn’t do anything truly bad but there are a few spots that might need some attention.

1. Story fits the game but still isn’t that interesting
   
   
2. Audio can bug out. If this happens to you, set your max FPS to 60 and turn of V-sync, this might fix the problem.
   
   
3. A few visible seems where the roads and ground don’t connect as well.
   
   
4. AI drivers aren’t smart. Sometimes they stop because you’re parked while delivering mail and they just refuse to go around you. And after you left, the AI might still be waiting there till the end of time, which could lead to a traffic jam.
   
   
5. Stiff animations, occasional bad scene transitions and a lack of emotions in character models during dialogue. These problems could take you out of the story, but since the story isn’t that important to the core of the game, it’s not that terrible or distracting.
   
   
6. Romance feels forced. Romance is possible between you and NPC’s but since your character is only in town for 2 weeks and there are no high stakes, there isn’t really a fire to the story that brings a romance together, leading to romances suddenly advancing really fast. Like a sudden passionate kiss after a friendly first date with a person you’ve only know for a couple of days.

Conclusion

Lake is a really colorful and lovable game. It’s not meant to be deep or evoking. It’s just there for you to have a fun relaxing time in a nice location with a friendly storyline and some decent music. And it also has a couple of easy achievements, if that’s your kind of thing.

“It doesn’t matter how far apart we are, the bonds we’ve made will remain strong. Everyone’s heart is connected to the people we know and trust. It’s those bonds that let us search for our purpose in life. As long as it’s a purpose you believe in there will always be someone who can help you fulfill it. There are no barriers, our hearts are one. Right, Sensei?"


How it started
This is a review I never expected to write and even though there are already many reviews I just had to voice my own opinion. I felt unfair if I didn't. Before we continue, know that I don’t watch anime, I barely play Japanese games and I had no clue what things like ‘senpai’ meant. I always thought anime to be cringy (still do) but the persona games, boy, they are something else. I will say right now at the beginning of this review. This game is a MASTERPIECE.

Like I said, I never felt anything for anime. But one day I was bored and I needed a new game to sink my teeth in to. That game, even to my own surprise, was Persona 5. A literal work of ART. I’m in the progress of writing a review for that game. After completing Persona 5 I went straight to Persona 4. Till this day I still don’t know what made me buy P5 but I’m glad I did. I’ve played nigh to a thousand games and these games are one of the best games i've ever played.

The Story and Characters
The persona games are about friendship and fighting for those you love. Any RPG player that cares about well written NPC’s and relationships in games can definitely find their place among these games. The game is filled with so much comedy and drama that makes you truly care about the people inhabiting the world. I've spent so many moments laughing that my stomach hurt or wiping away a tear for something bittersweet. By the end I felt that the friends I made in the game were real. I knew most of them as well as I know my closest real life friends. You get to know these characters so well that you know exactly who they are, what their response will be to something and how they view the world. Characters written so well as these are rare in video games.

Gameplay
The game is split in two sections. There is the ‘life’ section and the ‘combat’ section. During ‘life’ you spend time in the world, make friendships, improve your social and mental skills, solve mysteries, trade and sell items and more. But eventually that part ends for a short while and you are then dungeon crawling. Going through fantastical dangerous dungeons, fighting ‘shadows’ and defeating bosses with your friends through turn based combat.

Life
The ‘life’ part is the bread and butter of Persona. It’s what makes the games so great. The emotional investment you put into the social links with the NPC’s is what brings attachment and immersion. During the life part you get to decide how to spend your time. Days go by and during these days you do things like going to school, spending time with friends and improving your skills. This is done through two time moments. ‘after school’ and ‘evening’. Different characters and activities are available at different moments. For example, you can generally only improve you relationship with your uncle during the evening, because that’s when he’s home from work. Or, for instance, you can only do a food challenge during the ‘after school’ moment AND only when it’s raining. This creates a fun dynamic of a world that has its own unique quirks, making it feel lived in and making sure the game does not get boring.

Combat
The ‘combat’ section is what most people will probably break on. It’s also the part that I feared I would loathe. But it’s done well. It’s not too long, most dungeons can be completed within a hour and has enough to make things exciting and there are moments during the dungeon crawling where the plot keeps advancing, making some dungeons really tense. Though, if you’re not that into JRPG turn-based combat (like me) you can set the game’s difficulty to easy. This will help a lot (trust me).
Luckily the difficulty of the game is solely focused on the combat part of the game. It has NO IMPACT whatsoever on the social part of the game.

Graphics
The graphic look simple by today’s standard (game was released in 2008). But it still gets the job done. The profile pictures during conversations really help, as do the animated short anime videos that play during important story bits.
Music & Sound
If one thing you should know about persona (aside from the social excellence it brings) it’s that the music of this game is god-tier. Amazing songs and catchy pieces of music play during the entirety of the game. The music can range from up-beat to somber to moody to full rock and it’s AMAZIGN throughout the entire game. I’m not kidding, this is some of the best music I’ve ever heard in a game.
Be sure to give your neck some rest when not playing, because your head’s going to be bopping a lot to this music.
The rest of the sounds are fine, at certain moments you can hear some crackling here and there but it’s nothing major.

Voice Acting
My god. Once again, some of the best I’ve ever experience in a game. These actors knocked it out the park (Though I can’t speak for the Japanese voice actors since I played with the English dub).
The actors were at every moment able to convey the feeling of these character with perfection. They spoke clearly, voices started cracking when characters were close to tears and whenever a character laughed it sounded genuine.

The Bad Things
Now is everything about this masterpiece perfect? No. But these problems fall away when compared to the sheer excellence of this game. Though, I’ll share these problems here anyway.
I’ll number the problems down here

1. It’s hard to sometimes know where your friends are in the world and when/if your able to improve your relationship with them that day.
   
2. I suggest looking at a guide for the “perfect/true ending (but be careful to not get spoiled). The true endings are hidden a little behind certain requirements that you wouldn’t always know beforehand. And when you eventually find out you might be hours upon hours away from the point where you can fix your mistake.
   
3. Not many save points in the game. Save often and on multiple slots is my recommendation. Especially in terms of dungeon crawling where you need a certain item to go back to the hub world so you can save the game.

Conclusion
Like I said, this game is a MASTERPIECE. So many life lessons and feelings to be had. These games will remain one of my best gaming experiences till the day that I die. If you even remotely care about games with well written characters like Red Dead 2, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, etc, etc, then you WILL love this game. Though IF YOU ARE NEW to Persona. I do suggest to START with Persona 5. It’s just that bit more modern, is also a masterpiece and a work of art and has more quality of life features and better graphics. I PROMISE you, you will not regret your time spent on this game.

There is a lot to cover in this review. This game has so many issues but also positives going for it that it’s hard to not write an entire essay.

The Premise of Andromeda
We start back in 2012, Bioware had written themselves into a corner with the final choice and ending of the original ME trilogy. Aside from the fact that the final choice of the trilogy created a lot of hate and community backlash, the ending also resulted in completely different world states. No matter what kind of sequel Bioware would make, the amount of work they would have to do to respect every player's choice would be astronomical. One might wonder why they didn’t just canonize one of endings and then made a follow-up game based off of that ending, right?

Anyway, Bioware decided not to create a sequel, or even a prequel, but to just abandon the entire Milky Way galaxy and set their eyes on the one next door. Andromeda. Looking for a clean sheet so they can avoid having to answer the questions they don’t want to answer.

The story starts around the time where Mass Effect 1’s story ends. A successful human billionaire and her mysterious financial backer started a project called The Andromeda Initiative. A huge multispecies project where arcs get send through dark space towards Andromeda in an attempt to peacefully colonize “Golden Worlds”.
You play as one of the two Ryder siblings and gain through story events the title of “Pathfinder”. A rank/position within the Initiative that is responsible for exploring the Heleus cluster in Andromeda in search of habitable planets.
However upon arrival in Andromeda and waking up from your cryosleep the human arc hits an anomaly in space. Aside from encountering this strange phenomenon you also come across a hostile alien species that have their own plans for the Heleus cluster.
Together with a new group of companions you must now find planets and make them habitable by using abandoned alien technologies that are present on these planets. Eventually you create allies throughout the cluster, set up colonies, build relationships with your crew and make a name for yourself.

Combat
Combat in Andromeda is at a higher pace and with a lot more freedom than in the previous titles. This however means that many of the combat encounters have become stale. Most fights in outdoor areas have the same setup and places of cover. While the Indoor fights are less fleshed out than the ones in the original trilogy. It's not per se bad, it's just less detailed.
There is now a great emphasis on flanking and elevation.

Bioware also removed features from the command system in the original trilogy. You can still order your companions around but no longer are you able to tell them when and where to use their abilities. This makes combining abilities to create combo's a lot harder and forces you to adopt a "Jack of All Trades" kind of character. Going pure tech, soldier or biotic is less recommended since you're more dependent on you companions' abilities.

Exploration
This game focuses a lot more on exploration. Just like ME 1 you receive a rover style vehicle (Without weapons this time) that you can use to explore planets. In essence, the exploration is fun. However, uninteresting quests, repeating combat encounters and a rover that struggles climbing a small hill sometimes makes it boring. Luckily you can discover mobile spawn points that you can use for fast travel.

World Building
Most of the worlds are beautifull and have their unique problems and eco system. However, one thing bothered me to no end. Each and every habitable world has the same wildife, just only with different colors. You like dinosaurs? Well here are your dinosaurs in the desert, jungle, snow and acidic plains on different planets.
The world is also sometimes plagued by invisible objects.

Conversations
Bioware thought that players should be less obsessed with choosing for a certain “good or evil” choise and instead give them the ability to decide in what way Ryder would speak.
The basic Paragon and Renegade options in conversatons are gone and have made way for deciding between “Casual – Professional” and/or “Emotional – Logical”. And to be honest, I can see what they tried to do…But it completely fails. Instead of players deciding WHAT Ryder says. Players have to decide HOW Ryder will say something. This means that you can no longer decide a lot of things. Your character will say the same thing whether he/she is casual, professional, emotional or logical. It is all the same answer with just a difference in tone. This means that a lot of control over the storyline is taken away from the player. Where Shepard in the originals could influence an NPC greatly with a renegade or paragon answer, here, Ryder is only allowed to decide what the tone of his/her reaction is.
This also meant that I often disagreed with Ryder but because I could not decide WHAT she would say, She often dealt in absolutes. Black or white. There were no gray options that I could've chosen. And when there were gray choices then the black or white choices were absent.

The Rest
I'm running close to reaching the max character count for reviews so i'll just make this short.

Companions and Ship crew Most of them are awesome except Natalie Dormer's character. She has a copy/paste ugly Asari Face and the least interesting dialogue. Money spent on her voice could've gone to better places.

Quest Most quests suck. A lot of button pressing and fetching to do. Only a couple of memorable sidequests. Main quest is decent, Final mission is awesome, Loyalty quests are decent, Movie Night quest best sidequest in my opinion.

Graphics Graphics are beautifull. Character faces, not so. Animations have been fixed a bit but still not perfect. Overwhelming lack of facial and body animations in conversations.

UI ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible, please change it. Feels like a cheap console port.

Stability Can lag in tight spaces and had multiple crashes. Autosave also became corrupt at certain moments (dependent on what planet I was).

Conclusion
So this review feels really negative when I read it. But I’m giving it an thumbs up…Why?
Well like they say. The most judgmental people are sometimes the ones closest to you. They want to see you grow, be successful and do great things. Call it tough love or whatever.
Even though all of the problems I encountered, even though all the crashes, bad animations and crazy writing errors I still liked it. And it’s also a decent length game. It took me 90 hours to complete the main game and nearly all sidequests. I’ve discovered 95% of the galaxy and I only have a few trivial fetch quests left that have no impact on the story or are broken.

Also most of these problems are, I think, because of EA. The game feels rushed. If EA could just stop being such a ♥♥♥♥ of a company and had given Bioware maybe some more time and/or resources then this game could have been way better.
Did the game deserve the backlash that it got? Yes, definitely. A Mass Effect game should be better than this and it’s a good way to shake up EA. If people had been fine with it than the next Mass Effect would probably be even worse. I’m not saying every Mass Effect has to be a resounding success. But I do think that it should at least be a quality and polished gaming experience.
Is this a great game? No, however it is a good game and was worth the 15 euro's I paid for it.

I had a lot of fun. There were no tears or any major emotional rollercoasters. But there are some heartfelt moments, some moments of genius and comedy. There was a lot of potential here but it never got to be what it was supposed to be.
However, with the backlash hype against this game being over, I think it’s time for people to seriously look at this game and not just mimic the things Youtubers say.

Decent/good game. But the next one must be better.

One of my favourite games of 2019. The unique gameplay and style makes this game stand out among the crowd and one of the bright spots between all the drama with AAA publishers, lootboxes and microtransactions. It's sad to know that the developers of this game are struggling while scummy mega corporations are grabbing mountains of money with copy-paste games.
That's why this game got my nomination for the "Game of the Year Award".

Wonderfull game with fun and unique gameplay, gorgeous graphics, excelent world building and great quests.
I loved every second of it.

Really Tense game with a great setting. Fun to play solo or with a friend.

This game is great with loads of content and quests. I'm almost at 100 hours of gametime and still having tons of fun.

The ultimate "just one more round" game when playing with friends.