Lake: Season’s Greetings DLC review

Wintry holiday prequel delivers another charmingly simple, relaxed experience

For those of us in the northern hemisphere at least, Christmas is a time for battening down the hatches against the howling wind and snow, stoking the fire, and finding comfort with friends and loved ones. If the tunes are cheesy and the and the puns are groanworthy, that's just fine. And in the case of Lake's festive DLC expansion Season's Greetings, just as with your favourite sweater, there's a quiet joy in the comfortingly familiar, especially if it comes with a gentle twist. If the original Lake left you cold, this won't change your mind, but if (like me) you have fond memories of the good people you met in its peaceful lakeside town, it's time to break out the eggnog and get ready to dive back in. (To the world, not the lake. The lake's frozen over.)

If you've never played Dutch developer Gamious's 2021 title Lake, it's a gentle, beautiful game about delivering mail, making friends, and considering your life choices. To quickly recap, Meredith Weiss, a computer programmer struggling to make her way in the man's world of 1980s technology, has rarely had the time to go back and see her folks in the quaint Oregonian town of Providence Oaks (or P.O. to locals). Until, that is, her parents unexpectedly announce they're going on holiday and invite her back home to deputise for her father as the town's mail carrier. For two weeks in September 1986, she rolls around the titular lake in a mail van, meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends along the way. There are no puzzles trickier than figuring out the odd vague address, no epic plot to uncover, just wind in the trees, waves on the water, and plenty of time to think about what's important in life.

Season's Greetings is set nine months prior to the main game, starting the day before Christmas Eve 1985 (Christmas Eve Eve?) and running until it's time to ring in the bells for New Year's. Playing as Meredith's father Thomas, P.O.'s premier parcel provider, you must once again navigate the quietly complex world of the rural mail carrier. In among the letters and Christmas presents, you'll also find yourself delivering romance movies for date night, illicit fireworks, and even pithy quotes about dear old Providence Oaks on national television. Not to mention clearing up such mysteries from the first game as how Thomas's mail truck came to be known as "The Goose," how grouchy Space Invaders fan Matt wound up working at the motel, and just why two homebodies like Thomas and Emily Weiss will come to be sunning themselves on a Florida beach the following autumn anyway.

Though marketed as DLC (and indeed requires the base game to play), Season's Greetings tells its own self-contained story and is best seen as a prequel rather than a simple add-on. Taking place over ten days rather than a fortnight, it is a touch shorter, offering around five hours of gameplay rather than seven, but that still makes for a satisfying experience. Despite taking place chronologically earlier, it's best played after Lake so as to appreciate all the many references and foreshadowing of events to come, but anyone new to this world could definitely jump straight in this Christmas.

As lovely as P.O. looked in the autumn sunshine, it looks even better at Christmas under a covering of crisp, white snow, with all the houses decked out in lights and decorations and gentle warm glows spilling from their windows. Rendered in the same lush, lightly cel-shaded 3D as before, Thomas's round takes him from the town out to nearby farms and cabins clustered around the lake, making for a compact but carefully crafted world, packed with interesting nooks and crannies to explore.

The map hasn't changed, but the wintry scenes give everything a very different vibe. You can hug the shoreline or take a cross-country route through the woods, where the sun sparkles from the heavily laden branches while foxes and deer scamper lightly out of the way. Alternatively, you can stop to take in the view from a rickety fire tower, or stumble across a hidden church in the hills. Watch out, though, for the changeable weather: one moment the area is bathed in bright sunshine, and the next it's swirling with snow and covered in mist. There are some lovely little touches, too, such as Thomas's breath clouding in the cold air, or the way he'll sometimes pop on his glasses to make sure he read an address right, or rub his hands together to warm them up.

The van's radio provides a source of good tunes and local gossip, even if the bad weather makes it burst into static at times. It's still playing the same handful of country and folk rock songs that will later keep Meredith company, mixed with a few festive melodies and the dulcet tones of local farmer-cum-DJ, Jack. Together with the wind whistling in the trees, the rumble of traffic, and the crunch of snow underfoot, it's all nicely atmospheric, though I would have appreciated a few more new tunes on the playlist this time around.

Each day begins at the post office, after which you proceed to spend most of your time driving the Goose from house to house, either retrieving parcels from the back of the van or just popping letters into mailboxes from your shoulder bag. It's all pretty straightforward, even if old hand Thomas doesn't get the tutorial newbie Meredith will get when she starts out. That said, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out the controls if you choose to start here: just steer, accelerate and brake with either keyboard or controller, or pick a destination from the mini-map and leave the driving to the autopilot. (Self-driving vans in 1985? Amazing!) Delivery is then a matter of making your leisurely way to the mailbox and tapping an action key, or using the same key to ring the bell and leave a parcel on the stoop.

Most stops are uneventful, but now and again you'll run into friends or (on one memorable occasion) a stranded news crew, and that's where things get interesting. Sometimes these conversations are just an opportunity to catch up or flirt with your wife Emily, but you'll also find yourself getting invited to go ice fishing with the local lumberjack, helping fellow mailman and wheeler dealer Frank dodge an investigation, or playing Cupid for a couple from that news crew.

It was in these kinds of intimate, human stories that Lake's heart really lay, and Season's Greetings picks up where its predecessor left off. Your conversations are played out through cutscenes with multiple-choice responses that enable you to steer them in subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) nuanced directions, helped along by pitch-perfect voice acting. Even if these choices don't have any long-term impact on the linear story, they help your chats flow very naturally and provide welcome variation for subsequent playthroughs.

It's great to reconnect with old friends, such as the cat lady Mildred, video store owner Angie, and of course Maureen, whose neon-lit diner is the hub of the community. You'll also meet some new folks, such as the human database, Hawaii Five-O fanatic and occasional bookseller Beth and mechanic Ben. As a happily married and (mostly) settled man, Thomas isn't faced with anything like Meredith's low-key mid-life crisis, but he does still have some decisions of his own to make and can't help getting drawn into everyone else's dramas as well.

The festive season is a time of contrasts, as we leap straight from the joy and good cheer of Christmas to the quiet contemplation of New Year's, and the tales told here definitely reflect that. There's the fizz of romance in the air and some high jinks with the guys as they outwit The Man (in the form of postal investigator Walter Morgan), but events also push Thomas to reflect on whether he's content in P.O. or whether he's maybe become stuck in a rut, and he's not alone in having points to ponder. Rather than descend into wintry darkness, though, there are positive undercurrents here that see people accepting and making the best of their situations. For example, when Meredith calls to say she’s too caught up in work to make it home for Christmas, the Weisses simply take the opportunity to invite their lonely friend Beth instead, and wind up joking about the hideous sweaters Mildred knitted for everybody. Life isn’t all fun and games, especially as you get older, but moments like these leave you feeling appropriately hopeful for the future as the New Year's fireworks light up the sky.

Final Verdict

On the surface, Season's Greetings hews very closely to Lake's formula, inviting players to spend another couple of weeks in rural Oregon delivering the mail, catching up with acquaintances, soaking in the atmosphere, and possibly even taking stock of their own lives even as Thomas does with his. There are the same beautiful landscapes, the same peaceful (or to some, simplistically dull) gameplay, the same thoughtfully drawn characters, and even many of the same songs on the radio. But the differences go deeper than the coating of snow on the trees, as Thomas sees events through a very different, older lens than his daughter Meredith. It doesn’t flinch from the issues that raises, but balances them with an abundance of heart and humour. If you're looking to slow down and take a time-out from all the festive busyness this year, a return trip to Providence Oaks could be just the ticket.

Peter played Lake: Season's Greetings on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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