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Casual Friday

The above screenshot is from a game titled The Lake House - Children of Silence. I played the CE version of the game. This game, to me, is more about the bonus game than anything else. But more on that later.

The game opens with you and your fiance having coffee in a diner. The male half of the pairing is ready to propose marriage. The female half wants to accept, but some strange things have happened that make marriage a risky venture until some mysteries are solved.

Your apartment has been broken into. Your photo album has been destroyed. And there is a cryptic note from your brother, (that’s your step-brother if you are thinking through this as the male character,) that tells you both to meet him at the family house. Trouble is the brother has been dead for over 15 years. Well, obviously you must go.

Things get a bit confusing when you arrive at the house on the island where you grew up. (And by you, I mean the female half of the protagonistic duo.) Ultimately the male protagonist takes a lead role as his fiance is captured by someone who may or may not be her brother. This gets a bit creepy at times. If the brother is, in fact, still alive, what psycho-sexual motivations can he possibly have?

Well, your fiance gets kidnapped, so the investigation falls on your, the male protagonist’s shoulders. The kidnapper wears an iron mask. Aside from a dog and a few birds, the island’s only other human inhabitant is a self-appointed caretaker. Since this caretaker sounds exactly like the kidnapper, it doesn’t take much deduction for the player to fighre out who the likely culprit is. Unfortunately, the male protagonist who’s character we are playing isn’t quite that smart.

Cut to the end of the game. You and your fiance get married. The brother is found alive and he and his sister are reunited. The mask is found to be the cause of everything, and it is supposedly destroyed.

Despite the obvious sarcasm on my part, the game, put out by Alawar Games, isn’t that bad. There are some interesting puzzles. The music and graphics are fairly good. The voice acting isn’t bad, although the way the characters are presented when speaking their lines is awful. There is a non-interactive map which basically shows you were there are things that need to be accomplished. That may not sound like much, but the site is quite large, and anything that keeps you from walking in the wrong direction is welcome.

Now for the bonus game.

Your now wife continually has nightmares about the mask. She feels she must return to the island to investigate. While the initial site is in the immediate vicinity of her house is the same, most of the bonus game takes place in an entirely new location. Without belaboring, the wife discovers that the current wearer of the mask is a judge who also happens to be a serial killer. And while we are all familiar with the judge/jury/executioner trope, this takes it to a whole new level.

And while most of us think we know how this ends, most of us would be wrong. It ends with the wife absolving the judge of his crimes, and him not having to pay one iota of penance for his sins, which include, I believe, at least six murders. From a moral and ethical standpoint I think this ending does a total disservice to the game’s audience. When I finished playing I was asking myself why I bought it.

If you think you are going to get the game, Save yourself some grief and stick with the Standard Edition.

As I said

Despite the obvious sarcasm on my part, the game, put out by Alawar Games, isn’t that bad.

But that obviously only applies to the main game.

There is a correction. There is another person on the island, the schoolteacher we save. Don’t know how I forgot about her.