LAKE

Taz: All right, Matt. What game for Whitethorn games—what is the latest game to come out for you guys? 

White: Yeah, that’d be Lake, it came out September 1st. Currently it’s PC via Steam in the Epic Games store, as well as an Xbox exclusive for the whole family of consoles. 

Taz: For sure. And for Whitethorn games in general, what is your position? 

White: Yeah, so we’re a publisher. We currently represent about 29 intellectual properties in every country in the world and on every major platform. We’re basically an aggregator of cozy, approachable experiences. Doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to fit that aesthetic, but we really use three brand pillars when we look at games to sign. We want them to be approachable, by which we mean that anybody, toddler to grandma, no gaming experience to hardcore gamer, can pick it up and play it instantly. We say that they’re bite-sized, meaning that in the amount of time it takes you to sit down and have a cup of tea, maybe an hour, you know, you have a whole experience in that amount of time. And then we say that they’re stress free. By that, we don’t necessarily mean that they’re not difficult per se, but rather that we don’t lock things away from you in the game if you can’t ‘get good’, so to speak, so... you’re not going to die and have to restart the whole game, you know, waste your hour. We’re not going to hide content from you if you’re not twitchy enough. So those three things make up what we sign, and by adhering to those, we kind of have carved out a really sort of unique type of game, I think. 

Taz: That’s awesome. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of good stuff. 

White: I appreciate that.

Taz: [laughs]

White: I say it a lot, so it’s very automatic. 

Taz:  Yeah, you got it! [laughs]

White: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Taz: Can you give me a small summary of Lake? 

White: Mm-hmm! Yeah, so Lake is a narrative-driven adventure game. You’re a forty-something woman living in a major city in the 1980s, working on a precursor to spreadsheet software—way back when, before this was common—and so she has an opportunity to fill in for her father as a temp at the tiny mail office in her hometown in order to let him finally take a vacation. She takes that opportunity, being [a] good daughter, gets some time to also decompress in the forest from a difficult job. You live with Meredith for fourteen days, each day is sort of an episode, so to speak, and that, throughout, you sort of learn about the town and how it’s changed in the 20-some years since you’ve been there, as well as sort of how you’ve changed, and it’s very much a self-discovery kind of journey. You do get to choose what Meredith does. Time in the game progresses based on your actions, not based on actual time, so it can be as fast or as slow as an experience as you want it to be. 

Taz: Do you know if the game has— From what it sounds like, a lot of different decisions can be made.

White: Mm-hmm.

Taz: Does it add to the replay value? You go through two weeks, I believe, and then you can just, “Oh wow, I want to do this instead.”

White: Yeah. Sure. So I think this is the kind of game that I would recommend, sort of like what David Cage says, maybe not quite so oblique, and he says, “Don’t play my games twice.” I don’t— That’s not what I would say here. I think you need to play Lake once, play it as you like it, maybe put it down for a couple of weeks and visit again. So… there are different endings, there’s tons of choices to make. What happens with Meredith is entirely left up to the player. If you are a sort of more introverted person where someone asks you out for drinks one night and you’re like, you know, I really would honestly rather stay at home and read, we have a whole series of fully narrated books and TV series and things that Meredith can chill out with. You can be as much of a social butterfly as you like, going through and learning about all the characters.

The content of the game, the vignettes, the people and the characters are really what the value is here. A lot of reviewers tend to, you know, they see the M rating—which is just because of alcohol, mostly—they see the M rating and they think like, “Oh, it’s gonna have a dark twist kind of thing,” and it really—it does not. You’ll be very, very disappointed. You know, someone at the booth the other day said Life Is Strange without the strange, you know; one reviewer said Death Stranding without the bullshit, which I thought was interesting. 

Taz: [laughs] 

White: But that very much is the kind of thing we’re looking at here. We want it to be relaxing and beautiful and slow above all else. We as a company try to position ourselves as, like, you know, queer, pastoral escapism is really big in all of our titles, so...you know, if like getting two characters to smooch and run away to the country is appealing to you, you’re gonna find that in virtually every game we sell. 

Taz: [laughs] OK. Awesome. Awesome. And it sounds like you’re very close with all the developers of Whitethorn games. 

White: Yeah!

Taz: Do you happen to know what the inspiration was behind the development process? 

White: Oh, for Lake! Yeah yeah yeah. So actually it’s ironic: it’s literally just a postcard they saw that had this car driving in the Pacific Northwest next to this beautiful, kind of—it might have been Puget Sound, actually—and so the developers, one of the team members, Dylan, actually lived in Oregon for some time, I think for school. And so that was sort of the inspiration. They did take numerous reference trips. I think they were just struck by the beauty of the verticality of the Pacific Northwest, you know? I mean, I’m certainly not from here, but it’s hard not to appreciate it. You land, and you know, immediately as you’re driving on the highway, you have Rainier in the background, and there’s this really striking interplay of water and rock and tree, and we really tried to capture that in Lake. There’s a photo mode in there... And it’s 1980s photo mode, meaning you have no idea what the picture you just took looks like until you go to the photo shop and develop it—

Taz: Oh, OK!

White: —and so there’s a lot of that in the game that’s, I think, really important. It’s really about place-making and that’s hugely the inspiration there. I think also, Jos—the head writer, it’s a team from the Netherlands—he’s very much a movie buff. So there’s a lot of movie content in here. It’s written very much like a movie, and it very much plays that way. 

Taz: That’s awesome. Do you happen to know, also, if the developer—to go back—it sounds like, you know, they said, “I don’t want people playing my games twice,” things like that. Do you know if they were to do Lake over again, from scratch, would they change anything? Would they add anything? Would they do something different? 

White: Yeah, certainly this is a very pretty game, so I think one of the things that we’re all—you know, not struggling with, but one of the things that's going to present a challenge in the future here--currently this game’s an Xbox exclusive. Not to flatter Xbox, but the Xbox consoles are very powerful—like they’re very, very powerful. The series X is comparable to most gaming PCs that aren’t insane. And so, other platforms like Nintendo Switch, mobile... are going to currently have a very difficult time with this game simply because of the sheer amount of shadow play, light cones, like ray-tracing… That is gonna be... touchy. So...maybe the art style could have adjusted slightly so we could pass that, but... hard to say. Certainly we can hook you up with the developers on like a zoom-type situation. We normally do want to bring developers here, but you know, of the games you see here across the board, we have teams from the United Kingdom, Chile, Netherlands and Canada, and unfortunately 100% of those countries have marked the United States as a non-safe travel zone currently. So unfortunately we won’t be able to bring any of our teams. We normally do meet-the-dev hours at these things but, happy to hook you guys up. 

Taz: What has been—again, another kind of development question, but if you happen to know...

White: Yeah. 

Taz: What is the favorite part of the development process for Lake?

White: Oh, you know, for me anyway, the thing that I always find charming are like, in-development bugs. I know reviewers [are] generally like, they see a pixel off, and they’re like, “Aghh,” and you know, they’re harder on bugs than developers are. I think there’s so many charming things that have happened during development that are just like, you know, it’s ultimately a very simple mechanical game. You’re really not mechanically doing anything that’s too terribly complex, so there’s not a lot of opportunity for like, really game-breaking logic bugs or anything. You know, just occasionally a van goes flying off into the universe, or, you know, Meredith clips through a wall or something just bizarre happens, and those moments are always really funny in the development process. These are very decompressing. You know it’s stressful to make games, you have a lot of pressure on you, you know, there’s definitely a lot of pressure to perform a certain way, and to run at a certain frame rate and so forth. So, occasionally when something just truly goofy happens in the dev process, that can be very...decompressing. 

Taz: Yeah, I can imagine—in a stressful process, even like, probably time crunches and things like that, you could, yeah, experience your van like just fly off, and you’re like, “Oh shoot,” but...at the same time you’re like, it kind of breaks you out a little bit from… yeah. 

White: Yeah… It’s a feature. [laughs]

Taz: Is there anything else you want us to know about Lake? I know it just recently came out, fresh off the—you know, fresh on Steam—I believe Steam and Xbox you said?  

White: Sure, yeah. Yeah, Steam, Xbox and the Epic Games store. Yeah, yeah. 

Taz: Is there anything else that we should know about, or if you can tell our listeners about it? 

White: Yeah, I mean, I just invite you to go check it out. There’s a demo available, it covers a few days, you can start to see if this is something that’s up your alley. Certainly there’s lots of wonderful content creators that we’ve partnered with. They’ve done Let’s Plays and things to give you a little bit of a taste. Very much what we’re offering here is something that’s decompressing, relaxing, quieting. If you miss the idea of a game as a true stress-buster—just completely let yourself sink into the couch and deflate—this is something I think you’ll really enjoy.

Taz: Awesome, that sounds amazing.