Nostalgia is a powerful force for a lot of people. In media, creators aim to capture the feeling of being young and unburdened with present-day callbacks to the trappings of childhood — referencing the fashion, food, or experiences of years past. Game developers understand that phenomenon well, including the team at Gamious, responsible for 2021’s Lake. The Dutch studio sought to harness nostalgia in their slice-of-life sim, which provides a subdued take on ‘80s living in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
Game Rant spoke to Gamious creative lead Jos Bouman about how his team put together a small-town Oregon experience during what they view as a simpler time in history.
Building Lake’s Environment From a World Away, With Google Street View
Gamious’ 80s nostalgia trip Lake puts players in control of Meredith Weiss, a 40-something year-old woman who moves back to her hometown in rural Oregon for two weeks to fill in as the local postman. The dev team faced a unique challenge in building that environment, Bouman said, since nearly all of them were based in the Netherlands.
“The Netherlands is not quite as spectacular as the surroundings in Lake are,” he said. The Dutch landscape is generally flat, without the mountains characteristic of the Pacific Northwest.
The devs consulted Google Maps, using its street view function to nail down the look and feel of the game’s fictional town of Providence Oaks, Oregon. Gamious’ technical environment artist even had books about indigenous trees in the Beaver State and the greater Pacific Northwest region, Bouman said.
Lake’s setting also takes a lot of inspiration from classic TV and cinema. “We've seen lots of movies and series in comparable settings, like Gilmore Girls, Twin Peaks and First Blood,” Bouman said. “So, it's quite a familiar setting for us.”
The dev team hoped that Lake’s setting would be immediately familiar to players, too. Their aim was to put together a world that is easily digestible and that wouldn’t require a lot of exposition, so that players could “immerse as soon as possible,” Bouman said.
Gamious’ efforts to create a believable Pacific Northwest lake town certainly struck a chord with some Oregonians. A local paper, the Willamette Week, penned an article in May 2021 exploring how a Dutch game studio could have put together such a familiar environment, Bouman said.
“You really can’t get a bigger compliment than that.”
Lake’s Laid-Back ‘80s Setting Stands in Contrast to the Modern World
Lake is set in the mid-1980s, and the game goes to great lengths to remind the player that they’re in the nascent digital age. Emerging technology like VCRs and answering machines play a prominent role in Lake’s storyline — Meredith’s job when she’s not running packages for the Providence Oaks post office is at a tech company developing one of the first word processing programs.
Despite the prevalence of technology, Bouman said that his team selected an ‘80s setting for Lake equally for its more analog elements. “Some of our team grew up in the 80s, and felt like it was a time that was more laid back and relaxed,” he said. It was nice to not have email and mobile phones and the internet.”
The Gamious devs felt a lot of nostalgia for the ‘80s. The team had the desire to “create relaxing, lighthearted worlds for players to escape from today's busy life,” Bouman said.
“We wanted to go back to a time where things were simpler and meeting people played a more central role in your life.”
Bouman hopes that Lake can help people to just relax and get their mind off of things Ironically, since Lake’s development began around four years ago, that goal has become even more meaningful since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. “The further we go in time, the more need there is for a game like Lake. Sometimes it's nice to escape for a while and not get ambushed by depressing news.”
Lake Forces Players to Pace Themselves and Try Something New
While COVID certainly brought things into focus for Gamious, the studio had always intended to give gamers an escape with Lake. “It's obvious that people were already a bit stressed out with their always-online lifestyles,” Bouman said. “It was a deliberate choice to try to slow players down.”
Lake’s goal stands in contrast to the ambitions of some other titles, which aim to give players a fast-paced experience with a lot of bells and whistles to keep them logging hours.
Bouman said that, especially with AAA games, some developers are “not trying to make the most original game ever.” AAA titles have little bit of everything, he said: crafting, leveling, and a narrative. “They’re trying to please everyone as much as possible,” he said.
Not so with Lake. The game is intended to be an original concept, Bouman said, something that doesn’t crowd the gameplay with frivolous features that aren’t “adding that much” to the experience. That keeps the game’s story relatively short and simple, he said.
“We like to make the games that we like to play ourselves.”
As for whether there’s room in the larger games industry for the relaxing experience like Lake, Bouman said he didn’t want to be too outspoken about “what the industry should be or should not be.”
“I think that as long as people follow their creativity and make games they want to play themselves, it will be alright,” he said. “Perhaps that will inspire certain AAA developers to also lean a bit towards the way we created Lake.”
Bouman added that games like Firewatch, which provides a more no-strings-attached narrative, have been successful and impacted the industry positively. “In the end, it's all about making sure that players get to play good games and experience new gameplay.”
Lake is available now for PC and Xbox.