A Mail Order Escape

Beyond the glass of an apartment window, city lights shine against an empty sky. The dwelling within is richly furnished, all pristine from disuse, save for some abandoned coffee cups and a carpet circumscribed by pacing footprints.

The tumbling sound of a keyboard fills the room.

At the height of the personal computer boom in America, Meredith puts the finishing touches on Addit ‘87, a program meant to revolutionize sorting, saving, and expensing. In her digital diary, she writes, “It’s funny how a program designed to organize your life is the reason why I can’t be at the Labor Day party.”

Her boss, Steve, calls to ask if she made the deadlines. She did. She reminds him that she’s going out of office for two weeks, which he tries to persuade her against — "Two weeks is a lifetime!" Meredith excuses herself: her flight leaves early, and she is tired. The scene fades to black.

The next day, with the slam of a creaky car door, Meredith sits in a mail truck that winds through the interminable pine trees of Oregon. She passes a squat, yellow auto shop with four gas pumps, a row of homes with yards enclosed in white fences, and a bronze statue of a buck set against the flat blue waters of the lake.

Lake, released in June 2021, follows Meredith’s stay in her hometown of Providence Oaks, where she fills in as the town’s mail carrier while her dad is on vacation. You drive around town delivering letters and packages by day, and in the evenings you reconnect with figures from Meredith’s past. The locals find ample use for a newcomer with a mail truck and bureaucratic skills, and so you’re invited to co-conspire on everything from video rentals to RV repair.

These “quests” are resolved by Christmas movie logic: the construction of apartment complexes is forestalled by a heartfelt radio broadcast, old friendships rekindled with a talent show. Ringed by snowy mountains, concealed by layers upon layers of dark trees, the town has nothing to do with the outside world.

Meredith’s isolation in Providence Oaks might have been suffocating if it wasn’t exactly the point. Lake is a game about ditching everything, disappearing into the woods, and delivering mail.

I graduated college in the spring of 2021. My education was a complete success by any metric you could put into a spreadsheet. But by summer, I found myself living back home with my parents, bringing along a linguistics degree and the deposit for a doomed study abroad program.

When anyone asked me my plans for the future, I didn’t know what to say. A Wal-Mart in northern Missouri made me sign a waiver saying my car was a deathtrap. My dreams of traveling the world had all evaporated. I felt the artist’s call, but it only terrified me. I just needed time to sort everything out. So I had this line that I kept reciting, at first with a laugh, then with intensity. Eventually I started saying it without even being asked.

“I'm going to ditch everything,

disappear,

and deliver mail.”

Developed by Dutch studio Gamious, the defining aesthetic of Lake is a kind of vague Americana. The trees and mountains scream Pacific Northwest, home to plaid-clad lumberjacks and video clerks with round, thick-framed glasses. The bird-blue diner seems pulled not from the South but from a movie about the South, and its proprietor speaks in a nasally Oklahoma drawl.

Meredith’s involvement in the plot is also vague. Storylines seem to continue with or without your intervention, and despite some eventual resolutions, there’s a pervasive feeling of futility. Mrs. Jenkins asks you to take her ailing cat, Mortimer, to the town fisherman, who explains that she’s been feeding Mortimer cupcakes. And she will go on feeding him cupcakes, just as she will go on calling you Meryll and “mailman.” Likewise, a potato harvest keeps the radio DJ busy, so the same ten songs play over and over.

No wind moves the pale birches. The dirt trails are smooth and textureless, the lakeside road almost a perfect circle. Outside of the main drag of Providence Oaks, you won’t find anyone apart from the occasional passing car. Save for the occasional rainy day—a requisite nod to Lake’s Oregon setting—the world is bathed in clear, even light.

Not everyone you meet is especially kind, though there’s often folksy wisdom in their bluntness. Nancy, the general store owner, will attempt to console Meredith upon hearing that she left for college 22 years ago, only to return now. She pinches a cigarette between her fingers as she says, “Only a few people ever really make it.”

You can choose to explain that the assignment is only temporary. “That’s what I said too,” she says. “A long time ago.” 

I don’t remember where I got the idea to deliver mail, but I can’t discount the possibility that it came from TikTok. Sidewalks, surrounded by drooping Maple leaves, that branch off towards gardens and front doors. A van rumbling through sun-spotted streets and a fluffy neighborhood dog barking because he knows my scent. Videos like these filled my feed. I began to imagine walking these paths with an audiobook playing in my ears, endlessly prolonging my education. I can go on learning and learning, delivering the words of others forward to some unknown destination.

I became fascinated with a life spent in hallways rather than rooms. Rooms meant choices, and over the last year I had decided that choices were beyond me. I made the same oatmeal every morning; my grocery bill inflated as I bought everything that seemed edible; I couldn’t take my mattress home with me, so I just left it on the front porch. To stop anywhere for too long felt like death.

I was absent of desire, but not at peace. My aspirations suddenly transformed into fantasies in which I was no longer the main character. I became a spectator to my own imagination, shadow puppet shows that eclipsed the sun.

When I thought about delivering mail, my mind always took me to the suburb I grew up in. You’d think I was nostalgic, but I wasn’t. I just had very few geographies in my head to draw from. Over time I’d worn a rut into the prairies between my hometown and school, and if there were mountains ringing Missouri to obscure the world’s vastness—if my inability to see a future for myself were not a failure, but a total impossibility—it would have been a blessing.

On the third day of delivering mail, Meredith is given a camera. At first I chalked it up to standard photo mode nonsense of the kind you find in Red Dead Redemption or Far Cry, an excuse for players to provide free marketing by posting beautiful images online. I’m not easily charmed by graphics, so I usually ignore mechanics like these.

Then I came across the town mechanic shaded against the afternoon sun by the gas station’s canopy, flipping magazine pages in a dingy Adirondack. She was a pillar of cool among the cheap decorations and dented chassis of her trade. All I’d done that day was drive here, and all that lay ahead of me was more driving. It’s not like I was short for time. What could a quick detour hurt?

I snapped a photo.

Afterwards, every so often, I would see a quartet of crows in flight over the silo or a tunnel carving a cliff face in the rain, and I would block both lanes of traffic as I swung the backend of my mail truck to a stop. The cars bunching up at its sides would honk intermittently as I composed my shot.

I’d angered the motorists of Providence Oaks before when I parked slightly askew or caught someone nose-to-nose across a narrow bridge, and it mystified me that their honking was the game’s only nod to the real passage of time. Eventually I came to view it as a kind of affirmation. Yes, the cars will continue to pile until my vision of the woods is perfect. Yes, it’s all waiting on me.

Attempting to capture Providence Oaks on film showed me that what I had mistaken for stillness was, in fact, slowness. Wisps of clouds rambled over opaque, lapping water. I switched off the truck’s radio and found not silence, but birdsong, low synths, the engine’s hum. Things weren’t repeating so much that they were in no rush to be anything else.

In time, I’d found optimal routes through even the most secluded outer roads. In still more time, though I knew the shortcuts by heart, I took the long way around. Clouds will not cover the sky until Meredith’s last package is delivered. Tomorrow will arrive with more mail, more roads, more slowness.

But today, I drive to a solitary corner of the map where a dam cloaks the horizon in mist. I turn my back to it and sweep my viewfinder across the widest portion of the lake. Even the town is not visible.

T h a t   s u m m e r   w a s   v e r y   l o n g .

During several of Lake’s evening sequences, Meredith’s boss Steve pulls her out of vacation to work on Addit. “It needs your magic,” he says.

If anything persuades me of the game’s core premise—that anyone would simply jettison their career to go live in a ten-song town—it’s that Steve is a royal tool. The landline phone gives his aura of hurry a welcome distance as he says things like “I’ve gotta jet!” and “Hey listen, you’ve got plenty of time, right?”

In those moments, I wonder what keeps Meredith in her current profession. She certainly isn’t hurting for cash. A hippie couple offers her a free RV, which Meredith can nonchalantly accept or ignore at the player’s behest. She can then regift the RV with equal indifference to Angie, the video clerk, who invites Meredith to come with her as she lights off for a life on the road, another choice can be agreed to with a cheesy rejoinder or nonchalantly shrugged off . Money doesn’t factor into any of these decisions. I don’t even know if she’s on the post office payroll.

In one evening scene, Steve tells Meredith that he’s signed a multimillion dollar deal for Addit. He surprised me by admitting that none of its success would have been possible without her, offering her a partnership, a 20% stake in the company, and (he enunciates) a sig-ni-fi-cant raise.

How should I read Meredith, who can forfeit all of her belongings with the same ease as becoming a millionaire and a pioneer for women in computing? Who marks her obscurity and her glory with the same bad joke?

Meredith watches TV and files reports and confesses her love to Angie all with a deadpan expression that reveals neither exhaustion nor elation. In that expression, I imagine a lack of preference, a feeling that all roads lead to the same kind of nowhere and that the best anyone can hope for is a road that stretches on forever. But I wonder if I’m meant to imagine her thoughts at all.

There isn't much time to think in the evening tedium, only seconds. Then, after a brief loading screen, I’m standing in the parking lot again, and soon I’m circling the lake again. This time I park at the bait and tackle shop and walk to the edge of the pier. My eyes follow the far shore, its piney ridge mirrored in the water as a dark smudge. Birds circle above, and I try hard to not to notice how they cast no reflection.

“Are you stupid?”

This is not what my writing professor said, but it’s exactly what I heard. I snapped into consciousness: I'm sitting at a table on a concrete cafe patio.

My professor had asked me about my plans after graduation, and I’d vacantly trotted out the usual line, not expecting to be observed. Nothing in my response seemed to indicate an actual plan. Had I said, “I’m running away,” or, “I’m jogging towards the ocean and I won’t stop even when I hit shore,” nothing about my tone or demeanor would have changed. 

With far too much patience, she explained to me that you don’t just sign up to “deliver mail.” There’s exams, coding, record keeping, stamp selling, and vehicle care. Time does not contract itself to the pace of delivery. I would experience a boredom no loading screen can reach.

I blushed out to my fingers and down my spine. The sky was bright and empty, the pavement flat like a horizon in miniature. I shrank back from the sudden enormity of things. Even the tiny iron table in front of me seemed too far to touch.

I saw no way out.

I saw no way at all.

Lake ends abruptly, or it feels like it does.

One minute I’m watching the talent show at Mo’s Diner. Someone sings, “On and on and on and on…” Two weeks have passed since Meredith arrived in Providence Oaks. Characters keep asking whether she’ll head back to the big city tomorrow, but I can’t imagine the game will actually let her leave. Her work is empty, her boss is cruel, and games like these last forever.

Morning comes, and Meredith stands inside the post office, not outside of it. Her options are few:

• Head back to her home and career. If she does, it will become clear that this is the only sensible option. Frank quips, “Back to the future, huh?,” implying that all of this was something else.
• Pack everything into the aforementioned RV, alone or with Angie, and set off on a road trip. Meredith doesn’t call Steve to quit her job. None of the obvious logistical questions about living a life on the road are answered or even asked, just as none of the obvious questions about carrying mail were asked. This ending is fantastical, but not escapist. Meredith is not indecisive, but definite and bold.
• Stay in Providence Oaks and deliver mail, disappear into the rhythm of the town, and live in unbroken peace. But Meredith won’t take you with her.

In each of these endings, with some variation, the camera repositions to face Meredith from the dashboard. A Vantablack roof hangs over her head. If she chooses to stay in Providence Oaks, you can see the lake through her driver’s side window, but only in glimpses. Her eyes flit from the road to the rear view mirror and back.

A dark, metal box with portholes. This is the world Meredith has inhabited for the past two weeks. All those sweeping panoramas were not for her benefit, it seems, but the player’s. Otherwise, you just see trees flitting by on either side, like a hyperspace jump from some old sci-fi movie. One ending, where the lumberjack Robert chases Meredith down to ask her to stay with him, sees her step out of the truck and stand in the middle of the road, the woods looming around her. It’s liminal.

That summer I had no plan. I can’t say for certain, but I believe that if I had tried to carve a path in any direction, I would have lived to regret it. I needed time and I needed distance.

Instead, I disappeared into the woods of Lake, and I pretended to deliver mail. My time in Providence Oaks was unproductive. The stakes were impossibly low. But then again, I was tired.

Then it pushed me out. Not with a degree and an exploded tire and a rain-soaked mattress as college did, but with hope, or boldness, or contentment. Back at the main menu, a new “ENDLESS” option had appeared. But I knew there would be no place for me in Providence Oaks if I chose to pierce the ring of mountains once again; anything I’d done was already being undone. The peace of Providence Oaks didn’t hold me in its breath, but sighed deep and clear and quiet. Lake is not a game about giving up, but merely pausing.

As the credits roll, the camera pans over the lake one last time. “And an extra special thank you to all mail carriers around the world,” text reads, “because we know that the job is not as easy as we portrayed it.”

And as Meredith breaks the treeline, for the first time, I notice shots of yellow in the leaves.