REVIEW | Lake – Season’s Greetings

“Who knew delivering mail could be this relaxing”

Note: this is a DLC review. You’ll need a copy of Lake to play Season’s Greetings.

I really loved Lake when it launched in 2021. It was a relaxing experience where we got to play as a programmer escaping the busy city life and had to cover for her dad as a lakeside town’s mail carrier. In Season’s Greetings we play as her father during the final days of 1986, right before I was born into this world. The holiday setting makes it a perfect game to play in the cold month of December and I was happy to get back behind the wheel of my mailvan.

You’ve got mail!

Things I liked!

• Another excuse to play this again | As I mentioned in my intro, I enjoyed my time with Lake so a DLC was the perfect excuse to hop back into it and explore the lakeside town of Providence Oaks again in the Goose, our trusty mail delivery van. the gameplay is slow, but relaxing and meaningful. Delivering letters and packages and just enjoying some small talk with the villagers.

• Role change | I like playing as Meredith’s father. It’s not every day that you get to play as an older person close to retirement and seeing the world through his eyes was a new and fresh experience for me. You get to choose how to spend your time and I even roleplayed myself out of an interesting chance to go ice fishing because I imagined Thomas Weiss was the kind of guy that wouldn’t like the cold.

• It looks great | There is a nice aesthetic about the game. A cartoon look with warm pastel colours, combined with the snowy winter setting and festive holiday lights. Playing this at the start of December really got me in the holiday mood.

• No fear of missing out | Whenever I play a game, I want to be as efficient as possible in experiencing all the possible content. I’ll go out of my way to make sure that I don’t miss a single thing and will not require a second playthrough to get access to a part of the story where it branched off into multiple paths. If you simply deliver all your packages and mail every day, you’re guaranteed to get all the key interactions the game has to offer and it’s not to be underestimated how that eases the mind and relieves you of all FOMO-related stress.

It’s called The Goose because it honks.

Neither good nor bad

• Length | Season’s Greeting is perfectly sized for a DLC with about 3-4 hours worth of story content and plenty more if you just enjoy driving around in the snow. But I couldn’t help but feel like I needed some kind of extra closure at the very end. Though since this is more like a prequel, I guess you can just hop back into the main game right after!

• Replayability | If you’ve played through the story once, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever revisit it. Though there are some choices you can make that will have an impact on which scenes you get to see and you can pick between two narrative options in each conversation. I do see myself loading this up occasionally just to drive around the calm and relaxing atmosphere though.

Happy New Year everyone, from the LifeIsXbox team!

Things I disliked!

• Bugs | While nothing truly gamebreaking, I did encounter some bugs while playing the DLC. Cars that were driving through the road, with only their hood peaking out. I was able to walk through walls and one particularly annoying one that gave me a black screen after loading a manual save (that I was luckily able to fix by loading the previous autosave).

• Scene transition issues | Whenever a cutscene happens, and you get control back over your character, it’ll take a while before you can actually move again.

• No achievements | I talked to the devs about this and it was a conscious decision to not introduce any new achievements to the DLC and I respect that, but still feel like this might be reason for some people to skip buying it. A lot of my friends like earning achievements and I even enjoyed getting the full 1000G on the main game myself. In fact, I feel like they could have sold this as a stand-alone game, because now only a small percentage of players (those who already own Lake) will consider a purchase. Luckily, there is a bundle with both!

How long did I play the review before publishing? 4 hours
How long to beat the story? ~3 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | 0 (the DLC doesn’t have any)
You’ll love this game if you like these | Life is Strange, Tell Me Why

Do you prefer to see the game in action? We’ve got you covered!