External Links


Play online
In-browser DOS emulator. This will take a few moments to load. The title image and title screen will advance automatically after a few moments. Pressing Enter is not necessary on those two screens and may lead to skipping the introduction. It requires Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Opera. (Safari is not supported.)
Play this game in your Web browser.
Original story world maps
as drawn by Eddie Hughes
To view this file, you need an Acrobat Reader for your system.
LAKE Adventure.zip
Contains LAKE Adventure/index.html
Original competition release package; includes LAKE.​AGX suitable for playing in offline interpreter, and map PDF
Play this game in your Web browser. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

LAKE Adventure

by B.J. Best profile

2023

(based on 15 ratings)
4 reviews

About the Story

═════════════════════════════

LAKE Adventure!

By Eddie Hughes

Copywrong 1993

* * *

Revisited by Ed Hughes

March 2020

═════════════════════════════


Game Details


Awards

2nd Place - 29th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2023)

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(6)
4 star:
(6)
3 star:
(1)
2 star:
(2)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 4
Write a review


Most Helpful Member Reviews


7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
IFComp 2023: LAKE ADVENTURE, October 10, 2023
by Kastel
Related reviews: ifcomp2023

This game is an antidote for those obsessed with personal histories and their ultimate meaning.

We first learn that this game was originally created in 1993 by a thirteen-year-old Eddie Hughes. It was rediscovered by a forty-year-old Ed Hughes in 2020, and the version we have includes his thoughtful commentary. Hughes has also helpfully provided us with maps of the game in the form of his old math notebook. And as we'll learn later, the game is a recreation of the old lake house and the time he and his good friend Richard spent at the lake.

As the player progresses through the game, the author seems to gain and lose interest in a work he was once obsessed with but now barely remembers. Hughes laughs and apologizes for his younger self's antics -- a fully realized house with descriptive rooms like More Halls is very funny -- but the player will almost immediately encounter oddities. They can't go to his sister's room -- in the maps provided, it's blotted out. (Spoiler - click to show)Why are we collecting memory shards? The more we traverse, the more personal this game becomes.

It’s very tempting to compare it to B.J. Best’s other old-IF-in-IF work, And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One. Not only are they reminiscences of the past via interactive fiction but they relate to the relevance of the past and interactive fiction in our present. That work is, however, a coming-of-age relationship between two adolescents. We are playing the game with someone who is reflecting on his youth.

Instead, the game is more like Drew Cook’s Repeat the Ending as both include fictional commentary and also look to the past for meaning. In Cook's game, we find an affirmation of interactive fiction as a mode of artistic expression. We leave that game emotional and hopeful for Cook's growth.

In Hughes's game, we find nothing.

What remains of LAKE ADVENTURE is an adventure game full of bad memories not worth revisiting. Hughes doesn't want to remember (Spoiler - click to show)how heartbroken he was over his sister's death from leukemia nor does he want to think about Richard's death after drifting apart for so long. But the past has caught up with him and won't let go.

The finale gives me dread, especially since it felt like I was roped into relive his trauma. I wonder what went through the minds of young and old Eddie. Why did they put me through this torment? I guess they just didn't know what they were getting into -- and that's the really terrifying thing about rediscovering memories: we don't know what's going to come out of it.

This game is my nightmare. It goes against my beliefs about the importance of memories and traumas in autobiographical works, but I cannot simply look away from it. I know I have to stare at its truth because it is after all naive to believe that uncovering and reliving memories is unconditionally good for you. It can harm you. It can compound your trauma. It makes you remember what you've rightfully forgotten. You become an empty shell, begging "ancient history" to fill you with something, but all you've really done is widen the hole in your heart.

LAKE ADVENTURE is a tragedy for Ed Hughes and people like me who seek comfort in introspection. We can only relive the past for so long before it hurts us in our most vulnerable. Only through forgetting some memories can we find real meaning in our personal histories.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Goes straight to the heart, October 29, 2023
by Denk
Related reviews: AGT

Goes straight to the heart. In addition it is also a very good game which drew me in. Not sure if the memories were 100% true or partly fiction but they could all be true so in any case thanks for sharing.

It has a lot of things in common with Repeat The Ending. However, the game element/puzzles are more traditional and puzzly in LAKE Adventure. But their stories are both very impactful and sad.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Metafictional narrative about revisiting the past, using AGT, November 22, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

I’m going to put on my ‘extra-critical’ goggles for this game, because it’s by a previous IFComp winner (who presumably can stand up to sterner scrutiny), and is in a genre (autobiographical emotional retrospective in game form) that has had several recent start-studded entries (Sting, Repeat the Ending, A Rope of Chalk, and of course the author’s own game two years ago). It also intentionally uses an older format and is mimicking ‘my crappy apartment/house’ games, which has to thread the needle between not being as bad as the source material and being accurate to source material.

So how does it succeed? Overall, the polish is evident. I rarely struggled with the parser, which (combined with the other AGT/AGX/MAGX game this year makes me respect the engine a lot). Teleportation and combat are handled well. Death and being reborn could theoretically have really messed up game state, but it doesn’t seem to have done so, which is really impressive to me.

The game itself relies heavily on the commentary to make it ‘good’, which makes sense, because it was built that way. At first I was critical of the base game as being too basic, given the rich and full games I’ve seen built by children and teens recently (for comparison, look at Milliways in this IFComp!). But then I remembered games like Coming Home 1 which are actually very similar in layout and descriptiveness level to this game (although not in polish), so I guess it is pretty authentic.

Exploration was fun. Sometimes commands and interaction felt just a bit ‘off’ from games I usually play, and this was good; it felt like seeing interactive fiction written by someone who had a different set of experiences than me.

I’m not sure whether the game is autobiographical or not; I suspect not, but I’m not sure that should factor into the overall evaluation of the game. The background story is emotional, and hearing only one side of the conversation really helps here as you can imagine the other side for yourself, with version painting the narrator in a deeply sympathetic light or as a barely-tolerated person stretching others’ patience. One thing though for me is that it was always very clear that I was interacting with a fictional narrative, one held at a distance, and that I wasn’t drawn into. This is a personal reaction and not necessarily one all would hold. That’s actually what made me wonder if this was autobiographical, as real life scenarios are often less believable than fictional (like the fact that Tiffany is a medieval name).

The map is nice, and I wish I had read it first. I solved one puzzle it solves on accident due to my normal direction-flailing I typically do when playing games. It has some messages like ‘Don’t Cheat’ and ‘Listnouns’ that make me wonder if there is some hidden content in the game.

Overall, it was clear from the beginning that this has high production values and includes a lot of elements I like. So the debate wasn’t whether to score high or low, but which high score to shoot for. I’m still thinking about it; in a way this game is more relatable to me than Best’s last game, but on the other hand it’s a slighter thing. The ending, for instance, felt anticlimactic, more of an opportunity to sit and ponder than a neat wrapping up.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for other reviews on this; I feel like there are still some unresolved thoughts in my mind and maybe a fresh perspective can help. But I did enjoy this, and it was easy to play this on Gargoyle.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

See All 4 Member Reviews

If you enjoyed LAKE Adventure...

Related Games

People who like LAKE Adventure also gave high ratings to these games:

stone, by Penny Stirling
Average member rating: (5 ratings)
Can calcific amatonormativity be cured? An aromantic student struggles with stone and friendship.

Hercules!, by Leo Weinreb
Average member rating: (6 ratings)
The man. The myth. The soon-to-be legend. Your cousin has tasked you with twelve impossible Labors, but nothing is impossible for the great hero HERCULES! …so long as you remembered to bring your inhaler with you. Wait, did you not?...

Another Cabin In The Woods, by Quain Holtey
Average member rating: (6 ratings)
Your estranged mother left you the house when she passed. And her piano...

Suggest a game

Polls

The following polls include votes for LAKE Adventure:

Games that simulate their own aging by Beable
I'm looking for games that pretend to be another, older game - sort of like Repeat the Ending and LAKE Adventure - or that contain elements within them that are supposed to play like an older game - like And Then You Come to a House Not...




This is version 7 of this page, edited by JTN on 21 November 2023 at 7:31pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page