Lake Interview: Gamious Creative Lead on Developing a Relaxing Experience with a Heavy Dose of 80s Nostalgia
In video games, players often find themselves chasing objectives: completing quests, defeating enemies, or winning races. Some titles boast so many objectives that people are still discovering side quests and storylines a decade after release. Lake, Gamious’ 2021 narrative slice-of-life sim, seeks to turn that trope on its head, and also prove gaming can be a laid-back, relaxing experience.
Game Rant spoke to Gamious creative director Jos Bouman about developing Lake and how the game presents a story for players to explore at their own pace. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Explaining the 'Cozy' Game Lake
Q: Tell me a little bit about Lake. What does the story look like?
A: Lake is a laid back game set in the 80s. You play as Meredith Weiss, a 40-something woman who takes a break from her career job in the big city to take over her father’s job as a mailman for two weeks. She gets to know the people in her village and gets wound up in all sorts of little storylines. At the end of two weeks, she has a big decision to make: whether she wants to go back to her job in the big city, or stay. There's also a totally different option, but that would be a bit spoiler-heavy.
Q: Lakeis set in a fictional town in Oregon, but your whole dev team is based in the Netherlands. How did you set out to capture the feel of the Pacific Northwest?
A: That's a good question. The Netherlands is not quite as spectacular as the surroundings in Lake are. The Netherlands are known for flat areas, and there aren’t many mountains. We had to do lots of research on Google Maps, using street view. Our technical environment artist did lots of research. He had books about the trees in Oregon and in the Pacific Northwest.
And, of course, we've
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