At one point in Varney Lake you will meet a vampire. It’s the early summer of 1954, and a few friends are figuring out how to spend the lazy days ahead. They come across a shed and go inside. There they meet vampires.
It’s a fascinating moment and I shouldn’t spoil it. I will say, though, that I played this moment over and over again, and I was mesmerized by the way it was handled. All the surprising, subtle choices made on stage fascinated me. Although the vampire is scary, the scene is not simply scary. It’s full of charm and care, through the char acters’ memories of the adults in their lives and their reactions to things. And that wonderful juxtaposition, the darkness of the shed, the bright summer sun outside. This juxtaposition is enhanced by the fact that this scene, this present is also part of the past. It is illuminated by the bright, sometimes dazzling Sun of Memory.
Varney Lake is a follow-up to Mothmen 1966, which means it’s a Pixel Pulp pulp as a genre or roguelike themed gallery made by Argentinian microstudio. Like Mothmen 1966 Varney Lake, it comes across as a haunted CGA game from the early 1990s PC gaming scene. It’s a visual novel where decisions are made when you make choices through a text selection interface. The visuals are the stuff of absolute glory: appalling, amusing, and at times downright realistic, all presented in a handful of carefully chosen and paired colors and filled with graphic noise, pixelated cross-hatching, the mimeograph thick lines of cheap old mad magazines.
those colors! Varney Lake is the story of one summer in the 1950s and how it affected the lives of three friends. So it plays out in 1954 and decades later — the early eighties — as some of the characters get pulled back together to look back at what happened. The eighties part is all urban drizzle, and the colors chosen are mainly dark blue and a poisonous green. Everything feels claustrophobic and the rain is slippery. These two colors working together make it feel bad right now as disappointed men and women trying to figure out what all went wrong before it’s too late.
But 1954 was mostly a dizzying palette of yellows, whites and blues: landscapes of the promise of endless summer vacations, even at night filled with bright spots. While the 1980s pieces sometimes feel pretty close to 1966’s Mothman – they share characters and are both focused on making sense of what happened – the 1954 part, well, I’m still taking it .
Generally, I’m not a replayer of games, but I have reread Lake Varney is at least three times that. Part of it was me trying to see different outcomes and unlock different hidden scenes. In a way, I’m trying to understand the real thrust of the narrative that runs through the game. But I was really drawn back to exploring the boundaries of the 1954 part, where there was a story about three friends encountering a vampire, and of course, a lot of other stuff. Oddly enough, the proceedings have a peanuts feel to them. You might choose to lie on your back in the grass and look for shapes in the clouds – classic Peanuts riff and classic moment of Charlie Brown disappointment where he sees a duck and a horse and Linus sees the pilgrims Get to a new world or some such.
You may choose that. Or you can choose to go fishing. You might try to make some money. Pick something to do every day. Then, and only then, as night falls, you return to the vampire.
All of these things are puzzles that need to be solved, but they don’t always feel like that. Sometimes, they just want something to do in the summer. This slight intangibility—I’m sure it’s not actually intangible at all—but this sense of freedom in the center of Lake Varney is to me its absolute strongest point. It’s totally mesmerizing. The game gave me a summer vacation to do what I wanted, and then it added elements I couldn’t change that twisted events in certain directions and then–then! – It reminds me of something I co-create with the game itself. Anyway, that’s how it hit me. It allowed me to participate in building memories that I would then have to sort through with the characters.
In my opinion, talking too much can spoil things. And, in fact, I may have a very different feeling about the game’s events and game structure after the next reread. Be warned: if you come to Varney Lake from the Mothmen, you’ll have a lot of your favorite vibes, lots of intrigue and pulp art, and even a new card game. But there’s something else here too, another being, and I’m still enjoying untangling it for myself.
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