Lake Ridden

Lake Ridden is a first person Myst like puzzle game with lots of walking. It took me over 14hrs, but most people take around 8-10 hours play, so good value. Lake Ridden is a classic example of a game that could have been exceptional, but was failed by its confusing plot. You play as Marie, a 13yr old girl on a camping trip with your younger sister and friends. You have an argument and she vanishes into the wilderness. The story is you trying to find her and what you discover along the way. The canvas of this game is large as you stumble upon an abandoned estate, with a mansion, school, servant's quarter, wharf and lake. There is no fast travel, but you gain a map further into the game. The developers nailed the atmosphere perfectly. It was deliciously spooky with appropriate music to enhance the gloominess. The graphics are stunning and really hold up the game. This is not a horror game and there were no jump scares. If this cowardy custard could play this, anyone can!!! Sadly, the game was let down by the convoluted and confusing story about the previous occupant of the estate and his servants. The story unfolds by finding pieces of paper scattered around the place as well as journals, puzzle and music boxes. There are 9 puzzle boxes which increase in difficulty as the game progresses. Some are very well hidden. The music boxes were very easy to crack as they are really memory tests. To enter a new area, most gates or doors have a circular mosaic puzzle. These can be tricky because the background is very dark. The repetitiveness of the puzzles grated after a while. To activate the lift, there is a musical puzzle and you are required to state whether the note is high, low or medium. As I'm hearing impaired, I had to look up the answer. Just a heads up for deaf people. The devs got lazy with the interior of the mansion and quarters. The drawers and cupboards held the same contents everywhere and it was tedious going through them all to find a piece of paper. The attic was where the game really dragged as some of the puzzles were illogical. Thank goodness for a walkthrough! In the end, I felt the game was being padded out by having to walk from one end of the map to the other multiple times. The story was silly, I personally thought, and I was never really engaged by it. If it wasn't for the beautiful graphics, I would have binned the game a long time ago! This game would have been a stunning walking simulator without the confusing story and some of the puzzles could have broken up the walking. Great potential here, but it was sadly squandered. Buy on sale. Recommend as it is not a bad game, just a bit too long. 7/10

Such a frustrating game. It wouldn't work on my latest laptop as it requires a separate graphics card and on my older laptop, despite trying a variety of different settings, the music/speech stuttered horrendously and the mouse controls were atrocious. I also had to restart a chapter due to a bug preventing me from continuing the game (which meant I lost all my lore notes) and then that glitched out as well at a different point so I had to skip a bit of the game and jump to the next chapter. I have very mixed feelings about the narrative, it feels very in-cohesive and pitchy in tone. On the positive side I liked the atmosphere, the graphics and there was a lot to explore. Overall though I was very disappointed and wouldn't recommend this to others.

I guess I should have trusted the reviews. The game starts well with interesting, but not too hard, puzzles. The story is odd, but not bad. However, the puzzle boxes are starting to get tedious and you can't skip them. The game is just not interesting enough for me to bother going forward. I really wish there was a neutral option, because that's what I would give this one. But as things are, this is a No, since I wouldn't have bought this, if I had known what I know now.

Lake Ridden is an exploration puzzle game with a light story. The attention to detail is great and everything looks fantastic—the best I’ve seen in a while in an indie game '[in '2018']'. The puzzles are a mix of classic ones with a twist, some new ones, and some inventory-based, but also with some repetition. The story wasn’t anything too impressive, but okay. The music was mostly a relaxing background thing. I recommend playing—although not so much for the story, but for the puzzles and the exploration. The voice acting was competent, but sometimes also a bit emotionless or hysterically cheerful. The story felt like a bit of a mess: It started as a typical horror story, with people gone missing etc, and then changed into more of a children’s ghost fairytale. Events and characters from the first part were suddenly dropped. The story felt more like a mere container for the puzzles. This unfortunately made me lose a bit of interest around three quarters into the game, so for the last part I wasn’t as invested as I had been. Once, when starting the game, I got a black screen and had to restart, after which everything functioned as expected. The puzzles didn't always make sense. Some repetition and running back and forth all over the map. Final words: If you want to go explore a fantastically realized mansion and solve some puzzles, this is the perfect game for you: there is lots to explore and be challenged by. Just don’t expect too much from the story; it’s an okay fairytale, but that’s about it. Full review: https://maskinkultur.com/2018/05/18/review-lake-ridden/

[quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9686972/]Follow "[b]First Person Exploration and Puzzle Games[/b]" for more games like this![/url][/quote] I've been trying to play through this game for years. Every time I pick it up, I get bored or frustrated and put it down again for a few months. It's now been 3 years since I last played, so I've given up and am writing this review. From what I can remember, the environments are beautiful. The puzzles are not as terrible as everyone is making them out to be, but there was a lot of backtracking and wandering to figure out where to go next. I also remember the story being extremely confusing - I don't think I ever really understood what's going on in this game. Overall, it's an okay walking simulator. I would give it a neutral if possible, but since I can't, I feel like it needs to be a negative since I couldn't bring myself to finish it.

Oh boy.. where to start with this one.. Lake Ridden is a puzzle game in a walking sim. As for story, it's very basic and nothing is really explained. Seems more of a mixup of two completely irrelevant story lines. Graphics are dull. The first few area's are ok, but most of the game takes place in a very thick fog. Therefore, it's hard to see where you are going. On top of that, mouse movement is extremely erratic, making you do unexpected quick turns. This makes navigating even more confusing. Puzzles are a mixed bag as well. Some are pretty good, while most are copy-paste with little variation. Sadly enough, the in-story hints also contained red herrings. This turned some of the more logical puzzles into pure guesswork, at least for me. The best puzzle in the game was the graphics setup in the main menu. What the hell is going on over there? It just refused to remeber the frequency. And I had to enable 'resolution downscaling' to get rid of enormous fps drops.. on an RTX 3090.. for a six year old game with dated graphics... like what?? I was hoping the story would get more interesting and at least drag me along, but even that didn't happen. For puzzle die-hards, there are certainly a few good ones inside. For me, it was borderline positive. But since there's plenty more better games out there, I have to give it a thumbs down.

Before you hate on my review, note that I maintain the group for this game genre (jokingly called [url]"Walking simulators"[/url]. Sadly this one is exactly what people fear this type of game is when they hear the name: dull, uninspired and boring. These games are extremely story rich, they must be in fact, as there is no action to speak of. "Lake ridden" uses puzzles to break the monotony of its generic , bland environments. These puzzles are extremely repetitive - meaning they used the same puzzle, with the same design, in a slighly different configuration, over and over throughout. It's lazy - just like everything else in here: generic assets, terrible landscapes, irritating mazes and puzzles you played 100 times before. It's so sad something like that was released when we have gems out there like the Stanley Parable, Everyone is gone to the rapture or the mother of all walking sims, "Dear Esther". Major thumb down for me. Feels more like a student project than a genuine game.

Nope. Frustrating and samey puzzles. Too much back tracking. Story was too difficult to follow, and a bit all over the place. Nope.

This game is quite good. Wish I could say it is great or awesome, but sadly, I can't. It had a lot of potential, and did many things right, but there are also many things that simply keep it from being the awesome game it could have been. A few examples of that: - The graphics are gorgeous, everything looks really nice, there's a lot of variety everywhere. However, it lags quite a bit, no matter the quality (I have a geforce 1050ti, not the best, but not bad either, and I usually can run games like this one with max quality or so), and for the size it has, variety isn't enough: e.g. there are tons and tons of books, but they are all the same, over and over; tons and tons of drawers to open, but they all contain the same stuff, no matter where they are located (maybe leaving most of them empty would have been better, since this breaks immersion a bit); a lot of flowers and vegetation, but also mostly the same, repeated over and over, etc. - Some puzzles are great, ingenious, different from the ones you find in these kinds of games (and I've played a bunch of them); I totally loved them. However, others are very common, and are found many many times over in the game, enough to get you to hate them (the puzzles boxes you find all have an obnoxious flipping things puzzle; once I was tired, and couldn't find the solution, I lost a whole hour trying to figure it out, and ended up doing it in 5 mins the next day; I never wanted to see them again, however it was the third one out of nine!!). Most are very very logical and reasonable, and yet there are one or two that don't make sense (one in particular, a sort of "detective" puzzle, makes 0 sense for a number of reasons, both as a puzzle, and story-wise). - The story is intriguing, mysterious, engaging; and yet can be incredibly vague, to the point where I'm not sure I fully got it after having finished the game. Also, a lot of it is found through notes, which can be out of order, so you have to find all of them and reread them in order, which is a bit obnoxious. Also, you can't reorder them, and they show up in your notebook in the place where you found them, instead of in the order required to read them properly; this is something that should be relatively easy to fix and improve. - The size of the world is perfect for exploration; not too big, but not too small; properly delimited so not to explore things that weren't meant to be explored, and every place (or every relevant place at least) can be visited again before the end of the game, in case you missed anything. However, most of the stuff there is to find can be found by simply following the story, and so exploring is not as rewarding as it could have been. I think a bit more stuff to find would have been nice. - Characters are mostly great and very interesting, but they could have been explored a bit more; e.g. one of them is barely mentioned, yet played an intricate role in the story. The game may still get updated and improved, its last update was in march, so it is not abandoned. However, I think most of these things will probably remain unchanged. It makes sense, after all "a work of art is never complete, it is merely abandoned", however it is a bit sad, because this had the potential to be an awesome exploration game, and it fell a bit flat. Yet, all in all, I enjoyed the game, and I recommend you give it a go, just don't expect this one to be the next "Firewatch" xD.

Вот люблю я делать скрины, но эта игрушка стала для меня приятным исключением. Активно развивающийся сюжет, много локаций, загадок, пазлов, довольно интересных и порой весьма нетривиальных, то есть мозгами пораскинуть придется, - все это не давало мне отвлекаться на антураж. Перед вами хороший такой, крепкий мистический детективный триллер, На такое не жалко ни времени, ни денег. Классика)