Games don’t always need intense, high-pressure stakes to be worth playing; there’s a place for the calm and the cozy. LakeSide exemplifies this philosophy - what looks like a simple city builder turns ouꦚt to be an incredibly meditative experience. Some people treat ‘casual’ as a dirty word when it comes to games, but we could do with more high-quality, laidback experiences, especially in genres where those experiences are lacking.
LakeSide has you create a city on an island, presumably in the middle of a very large lake. Gameplay is quite simple - you set your citizens to work harvesting wood and stone, and you use them to construct houses, granaries, warehouses, and the like. Each building contributes something to your settlement, such as passive♚ food production, a bonus to production, or the capacity for more citizens. The aim of the game is to slowly build up your island empire and eventually construct a wonder. In my first playthrough, I built a glorious pyramid, and the satisfaction of seeing it completed after so many decades was palpable.
The singular tricky mechanౠic to handle in LakeSide is balancing your housing capacity against your population - theoretically, people will migrate to your city until you reach the housing cap. This isn’t the case, and if you don’t build enough houses to balance your ever-growing population, you&r♊squo;ll end up with people dying on your streets. Admittedly, they’re three-pixel people, so it’s not exactly heartwrenching, but the game will guilt-trip you wonderfully with accusatory messages that pop up from the bottom of the screen.
I say tricky - it’s very difficult to end up completely stuck in this game. Sure, your people may die and you might end up wasting food because you harvest more than you can store, 💙but even with disasters like earthquakes and fires tearing through your buildings, there are no massive obstacles thrown your way. I appreciate how the game keeps you on your toes but never truly punishes you for mistakes; it only asks you to wait a little while before you can recover. This is assuaged in Cozy Mode, which does away with natural disasters, and there’s a Creative Mode that lets you build a city with no limits.
I’d had my eye on the game before I knew a single thing about the gameplay, and that’s due to how gorgeous it is. LakeSide has some of the prettiest pixel art I’ve seen in an indie title. The muted colouꦕr palette adds wonderfully to the chilled-out vibes, and the game’s soundtrack is relaxing and pleasant. Sometimes the building designs clash a little, and it becomes tricky to tell which buildings are which, but it’s not exactly a dealbreaker.
The one thing I’d change about LakeSide is how it delivers new buildings to you. After finishing the semi-random quests or reaching new population levels, you’re handed a reward consisting of a choice be🐻tween three different buildings to unlock. If you don’t choose the buildings you need right away, you might be waiting entire decades before it swings around again to let you progress - and there’s no way to know what buildings you need on your first playthrough. Spending about 40 years without a warehouse, meaning I couldn’t store enough wood or stone to construct ﷺhigher-tier buildings, was a painful experience. Guaranteeing the appearance of necessary buildings would be a better way to handle this.
Any frustrations I have with LakeSide are terribly minor. While it never does anything groundbreaking, it's a lovely game that feels like soul food in a genre so full of complex gameplay and hardcore resource management. It really is the island of calm in tumultuous waters, and I find myself playing it to relax after a long day more often than I thought I would. I’m excited to see what comes next, not least because the new wonders added to the game always end up looking, in a word, wonderful.