Increasingly, story-driven games feature branching narratives: choices the player makes throughout the game that affect the story’s outcome. Gamers often agonize over those decisions, because sometimes those choices lead to undesirable consequences. Titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 are known for their jarring "bad" endings, which occur depending on how the player approaches the narrative. Much like those titles, Gamious’ Lake puts player choice at the center, but the slice-of-life sim isn’t aiming to cultivate that same anxiety.
Lake’s take on choice can best be summarized by one particular sequence in the game: a seemingly tense interview between the player character and a U.S. Post Office bureaucrat. Game Rant spoke with Gamious creative director Jos Bouman about the perspective this short interaction provides on branching narratives in games.
Lake’s Interview Scene Builds Tension, Then Immediately Drops it
By the time players arrive at the sequence in question, they’ve been in the shoes of protagonist Meredith Weiss for some time. Weiss, a middle-aged woman working in the budding tech industry of the 1980s, has moved back to her lakeside hometown of Providence Oaks, Oregon to fill in for her father as the local postman for two weeks. In her surrogate role she works under Frank, the town’s postmaster.
After just a few days, Weiss delivers a letter for Frank, which she later learns contained bets on baseball games - an unethical use of the postal service. She is contacted by Walter Morgan, a postal ethics investigator, who shows up unannounced at the Providence Oaks office the next day.
What follows is an interview between the two characters, where Morgan asks whether Weiss knows about Frank’s involvement in sports betting and if she has been aiding his exploits. The player has multiple options to tell the truth, lie, or feign ignorance. No matter what the player chooses, the next day Frank isn’t in the office. But, instead of the postmaster’s absence becoming a turning point in Lake’s story, he shows up again just a couple of days later. Bouman said the anticlimax of Lake’s interview sequence is “the absolute highlight” of the game, likening it to a scene in the 2003 film Lost in Translation.
“There's this moment Lost in Translation where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are on the bed next to each other, and usually in movies there would then be some sort of intimate scene,” Bouman said. “But they just hold each other's hands. That’s a moment where you realize that it’s a different kind of movie.” For Bouman, Lake is a different kind of game. Instead of some important plot point, players get “quite a lame interview” about Frank’s betting habits.
“It’s built up quite a lot, but then you realize that one or two days later Frank is back, and that you can just go back to enjoying the game.”
Lake primes players to invest emotionally in their interview with Morgan by tying Frank’s fate directly to their own actions. Players are “lured into a trap,” Bouman said, because they are forced to accept Frank’s envelope. “They knew they were breaking the rules of the postal service, but at the same time those rules were nothing major.” Despite that, the player’s actions feel like a much bigger deal in the moment.
Lake Makes a Statement on Player Choice and Freedom
Lake’s interview sequence demonstrates Gamious’ ambition to remove decision anxiety from the experience. “We didn’t want the player to feel stressed about what choices to make,” Bouman said. “You need to be involved, of course, but we never want the player to feel regret after choosing something and then going back to an older save file to replay it.”
By setting up a red herring for players in the form of Morgan’s interview, Lake is also making something of a statement on how games approach decision-making, Bouman said.
“I do see developers that tend to turn things from zero to 100 in a minute. That's not always necessary. It creates a disconnect, and it lowers the immersion. We just want the player to feel like they can go with the flow, follow their gut and see where they end up.”
It’s not that choices don’t matter in Lake; the player’s interactions with story characters help inform their final decision about whether Meredith stays in Providence Oaks or returns to the big city. But the game “treats you like an adult,” Bouman said. Lake also takes a unique approach to its gameplay structure, designed to subvert the “confrontational” nature of some games.
“People are trained, by their gaming history, that they should chase a goal,” he said. “In Lake, the goal is not very apparent. All you have to do is deliver mail and things happen.” The game’s branching storylines are “nothing too spectacular,” which was a conscious decision. Gamious wanted players to enjoy the game environment without feeling rushed or pressured to check every corner of the map for collectibles or story items.
“We are going for an original experience, something that’s not out there yet and not bothering players with extra features that are not adding that much to the core gameplay,” Bouman said.
Lake is available now for PC and Xbox.