It’s a warm summer day of 1986, and you’re driving through the winding roads of a small town in America. The sun is shining, the radio is playing, and life just seems to slow down. This is the feeling that Lake, a game that I recently played, manages to capture perfectly.

In Lake, you play as Meredith Weiss, a big-city girl who decided to take a break from her busy life and spend two weeks in her hometown of Providence Oaks. She promised to deliver mail while her father, the mailman, is out of town on holiday. It’s a simple premise, but executed well. As you drive around the town in your mail truck, you get to know the locals, learn their stories, and appreciate the snail pace of snail mail.

It’s not only the narrative that establishes this theme – the gameplay itself is slow and deliberate. In this post I’d like to break down how game’s mechanics – the space you navigate, the time you perceive, and the freedom you’re allowed – work together to support the laid-back approach. And since I love maps, let’s start by analyzing one!

Lake, despite being an indie title, is a sizable open-world game. You have a truck-load worth of mail, but you’re free to deliver it in any order. Will you plan your route methodically and optimize travel time? Will you visit your favorite residents first? Or will you choose where to drive next on a whim? You can even take a pause from work and just explore the countryside.

Despite all the options, I never felt overwhelmed, and quickly memorized the road layout. All thanks to the geographical feature hinted in the game’s title – the lake itself.

After straightening playable area that encircles the lake, I realized it’s just one main road with several minor side paths. Rather than belonging to an open-world game, it’s more reminiscent of a level in a 2D platformer. This smart environmental design makes the map easy to navigate. When I felt lost, all I needed to do was to keep driving around the lake. Sooner or later, the road would lead me to my destination.

I wonder how early in the development the map took such a unique shape. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was early on, and the name of the game was then selected to reflect it. Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the duration of Meredith’s stay was decided early in development, given how big of an impact it has.

The game is constrained by two apparent time limits. The first one envelops the whole story, as Meredith states clearly at the beginning that she’s visiting only for two weeks. The second is felt literally on a daily basis, with every working day starting when she departs the post office in the morning and, having delivered all letters and packages, returns in the evening. Neither of these deadlines is what they seem to be.

Time limits are often stressful in games. For example, while I liked the setting of border control simulator Papers, Please, I constantly felt unnerved by its always-ticking clock. Eventually I stopped playing because of it. Time in Lake, on the other hand, is used to make the game more friendly and transparent.

Establishing two weeks’ counter early on meant that I always knew how far in the game I was. When the weekend arrived, I realized I’m roughly halfway through, and could anticipate how much longer I would need to finish the game. As a dad who routinely checks HowLongToBeat.com before starting any game, I welcomed this subtle indicator. Individual days worked similarly, and noticing how long I needed to finish one influenced my decision whether I had time to start another or not.

While the duration of the whole game is a real time limit, the length of individual days just pretends to be one. Yes, on each day I started Meredith’s shift in the morning light and wrapped up when the sun set, but the flow of time is not linear. It waited for me, ensuring that I can experience everything the day has to offer at my own pace. If I were to park on a side of the road and just enjoy the scenery, the day would go on forever. The game created a convincing illusion of passing time without forcing me to stress about it.

I actually tried to observe when the time progressed forward, but I could not get a definitive answer. I suspect time moves forward a bit every time I deliver mail, but without concrete proof. And this is not the only clever detail that helps to construct such a relaxing mood.

It’s no wonder that a game that aims to stay casual does not feature any damage system. The mail van, other cars, pedestrians, even the environment around are all immune to damage. But not only are there no destructive collisions, there is also a lack of scheduling collisions.

As Meredith meets new people and reconnects with old friends, she can schedule after-work meetup with them. I was a bit cautious at first, worried that I’ll double book my evening and then have to turn somebody down. But the game is designed in a way that there is no such conflict. Even Meredith’s pushy boss can ask her to work during evenings without harming her social life. That doesn’t mean there is no drama, but that comes from choices I made during those events, not from scheduling them in the first place.

Even the main conflict – whether Meredith will return back to the hustle of the big city, or stay and live a peaceful life in the town – was established early on and remained at the back of my mind throughout the game. That helped me to form my opinions, rather than being presented with the unexpected choice at the end (to be fair, my decision was interrupted by another character who convinced me to change my mind; I did not expect it and was pleasantly surprised).

In the game industry, it’s unfortunately common that a game’s story, art, or music tells one story, while its gameplay provides a completely different feeling. So it was refreshing to play a game where all elements, down to the smallest detail, reinforce the core theme. Lake is slow and deliberate, like a handwritten letter, delivered by someone who cares.

P.S. Gamious, the studio behind the game, is based in my current city of Haarlem, The Netherlands. Always count on the Dutch to design a perfect chill-out experience.