Lake Starlight

Lake Starlight is an incomplete young-adult fantasy game, where you play as a teenage girl on the day of her “coming-of-age” celebration, during which she will be given the choice to go to a Magical Summer Camp™ to harness her powers or * shrug *. Themes of sisterhood, environmental justice and anti-corporation are prevalent throughout the story. The current version includes two endings: a “sad” one, and the end of Book 1 (which ends abruptly).

I didn’t particularly enjoy this game, honestly. It wasn’t much of the typical YA setting where the Earth is on fire, society is really bad, but you (yes you! a teenager) can change the course of humanity and solve all its problem (with magic!) - those can be pretty fun! But the execution didn’t quite click with me.

I think part of my issue with it was both in how lengthy the passages where, giving the player little to do but try to digest the over-exposition of concepts or other characters. I’d often go dozens of passages before I could do something… if the game wouldn’t pull the rug from under me and end up choosing for myself instead. I wondered what the point of it all was…

Even if the game goes all-in with the exposition, and in a pretty cliché way (a very-YA style), it often does very little with the concepts introduced. The world is pretty bad all around, but who cares, here’s your ticket to essentially Heaven on Earth for the summer. Meet a bunch of girls with tragic or at least interesting backstories, but you don’t get much to do with them or engage with those background either. The reason for it being the story being incomplete. One would hope this would end up being more fleshed out when/if the game updates.

I played this game twice, finding the bad ending first… and I think I liked that ending better. It at least gave closure. The “good” path of Book 1 ends too abruptly…