Lake

Lake is a narrative adventure game developed by Dutch studio Gamious and originally released for Xbox Series X/S and Windows in September 2021. Whitehorn Digital published the game. Its story is set in 1986 in Providence Oaks, Oregon, a fictional lakeside town inspired by the Pacific Northwest. The player controls Meredith Weiss, a software engineer who leaves her job in the city temporarily to cover her father’s mail route while he and her mother take a holiday.

For two weeks, Meredith drives the familiar blue United States Postal Service truck, delivering letters and parcels, speaking with residents, and deciding how to spend her free time. The game’s deliberately unhurried structure makes those deliveries its central activity, rather than treating them as a brief introduction to combat or a mystery. Conversations and optional choices shape Meredith’s relationships and the direction of her future.

She reconnects with Kay, a former friend who runs the local video rental store, and meets Angie, the owner of the diner Muggsy’s. Meredith can pursue a romance with either woman, or avoid romance altogether. Her brother Thomas also figures in the story, as do longtime residents whose requests range from ordinary deliveries to more personal favors.

The game frames these encounters against Meredith’s uncertainty about returning to her demanding career in the city. At the end of her substitute postal work, players choose whether she goes back to that life or remains in Providence Oaks. Lake therefore places career and personal decisions inside a small-town routine, with its 1986 setting reflected in cassette tapes, payphones, and period technology.

Gamious later returned to Providence Oaks with Lake: Season’s Greetings, a prequel story released in November 2023. It takes place during the Christmas season of 1985, one year before the main game, and puts players in control of Thomas Weiss. In this episode, Thomas handles the mail route while Meredith is away building her career. The prequel preserves the delivery format while showing Providence Oaks from a different member of the Weiss family. Its seasonal setting adds snow, Christmas decorations, and holiday obligations to the town’s everyday rhythms.

Across both titles, the postal route is not merely a backdrop: it is the means by which the Weiss family encounters the people of Providence Oaks. Lake’s premise begins with Meredith replacing her father; Season’s Greetings reverses that arrangement by making Thomas the temporary carrier for the holiday season in 1985.