Lakewood Story: Episode 1

Lakewood Story is a 6-year old horror game that’s mainly notable for the relatively high download count it got during that time in spite of being one of the more broken games I played.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



As the screenshot above shows, some areas in the game can get ridiculously dark. There’s actually a second character right behind him, and the entire screen is one large room, but none of this can be seen at all. This is an extreme example, though, one that happens near the end of the demo, where the developer might have rushed things a bit in order to just finish something playable. This happens to people, especially if they start off investing a lot of effort into the very beginning to wow the player, and run out of time for much else. In this case, though, you are greeted (after the text crawl telling you the same thing as the page description) with this:



And this:



To be fair, some of the small houses above have decent compact indoor mapping and the pitch-black house has acceptable rooms as well, but there’s nothing truly good to outweigh the bad here. Soundtrack tries hard, though, since it includes greatest hits from Silent Hill 2/3/4, Resident Evils, main themes from Friday 13th, Psycho, The Shining, Halloween and Exorcist films and even some Fable 3, WoW and Runescape music. (If you are wondering how high fantasy music would fit with modern horror, well, many of it didn’t seem to get used at all.) Still, when after the silent, misaligned, error-filled and poorly readable text crawl you see the horrible mapping at the start suddenly accompanied by Null Moon, you mainly just feel sorry for the composition itself. Sound-wise, footstep sounds are present, surprisingly enough. Besides the regular “hard surface” sound, there’s also one of papers rustling whenever you walk through them, which is a nice touch (though squelching sound for going through blood, like in Backstage, is absent)

Storyline



Main character recounting the story so far.

You are a CIA agent, Jason and you have a partner, Jane, while Maggie is your back-up. Yes, technically CIA is not supposed to do domestic investigations at all, but would you really hold this against the game when its text crawl has delightful sentences like “They say they get phone call’s at night with the women screaming blue murder on the phone.” or “Sometimes the couple’s family saw them stabbing themselves with knives”? As you enter the ruined town, the game delights somewhat by seemingly giving you the freedom to explore Lakewood’s houses in whichever order you choose. That delight is short-lived, as the game then unpredictably has some interactions trigger transitions, with no chance to back out of them, and often no warning as well. I mean, I suppose you can predict that a house which has a door left open is the plot-relevant one, but should you really immediately assume that the person you supposedly control will just say “I still need something here” if you try to leave after accidentally entering it? Moreover, that same house has a “spark” highlight on a shelf, and you would assume any transition would hinge upon taking whatever item there was, and avoid doing so until you look at all the other things. Instead, interacting with a perfectly unremarkable bed makes him say “I should lie here and wait for Jane”, and this is exactly what happens, with you not given any choice to do anything else. This is one of the first instances where the protagonists’ behavior becomes outright idiotic: the house is ransacked, just like the rest of the town and he himself says “Whatever is left here is very angry” upon entering! Yet, (incredibly) he is not actually attacked; there’s an eerie scream, he wakes up, finds Jane, says that “ when I arrived I heard young girl singing like a mind contorl singing so be careful” (I actually had no idea what he was referring to at first, because an audio file of said singing only triggers when you walk onto a certain unnotable tile near the beginning, which I bypassed the first time around).

Anyway, he starts checking out the area, first alone and eventually with Jane, and starts finding bodies pretty soon. However, they never give it much of a thought: at first, you at least get a vaguely regretful line when interacting with them; after the mansion in the end is strewn with them, he decides that “This town and what ever is in it, does not take shit for an answer all these people dead.” is sufficient. What neither he or Jane ever tries to do is establish the identity of any of the victims – i.e. technically the first job of any law enforcement. The remarkable thing is that unlike pretty much every other horror game, you are not trapped in that Lakewood; moreover, you are not even cut off from the world; the screenshot above is him on the line with Maggie, who phones in as they enter the mansion that’s the game’s final location, to, among other things, say that they shouldn’t go inside because everyone who does so dies, to which he says “too late” and “you should have done that 20 minutes ago” even though they just entered, and are literally standing in its doorway. Why they can’t call in the normal cops to remove the bodies, identify them and do proper stuff is completely unknown. They could have had posted videos on Facebook too: it says the game takes place in 2011 at the earliest, and in a pitch-black (i.e. no electricity whatsoever) Foreman’s Office you find and open, working computer (!) with an unsent email (!!) saying some crap about ghosts.

Semi-regular little ghostly girl jumpscares are pretty much the only intentional source of horror here (besides horror banalities like dead bodies and “books with blood on them”, etc.) Sometimes, they literally scream and pass through which is kind of sudden and disturbing. However, it’s basically impossible to take them seriously after coming face to face with one, who literally just says “You not my mommy” (!!!), screams, and disappears, doing nothing to you. They are nowhere near as scary as the stupidity of protagonists who keep pushing forward in spite of seeing such ghosts multiple times and being regularly told they’ll get killed if they continue.

Gameplay

Lakewood Story features something I’ve never seen done before – a code lock puzzle where the key consists of one (1) number. There’s no penalty for getting it wrong either, so you can just ignore the crappy riddle book (where the clue seems to be wrong anyway) and brute force it quickly. The above is still the closest it gets to having recognizable, engaging gameplay. This is because you cannot get into the menu, and so you can neither use anything you find (which includes both weapons and the frequent Bottles of Rum/Sodas, which I presume fulfil healing role), nor save in any way. However, you cannot be damaged in any way either, so it all kind of balances itself out.

Some passability bugs:



Conclusion



This is the point where the game glitches out, since your characters just get stuck in place here. According to the comments, other people also had this problem, but the creator never got around to fixing it, let alone complete it past "episode 1".

Lakewood Story is another example showing us that measuring the quality of a game by its download count is a flawed approach even on a place as (relatively) small as RMN. Pretty much the only reason I didn’t straight-out go for 0.5 stars is because of the good music choices and the occasional unintentional hilarity.