Varney Lake Review

Varney Lake is a great little adventure game that will make a couple of hours on a weekend afternoon simply melt away.

This review is spoiler-light and will touch on story beats from the game’s first twenty minutes.

What is Varney Lake?

Varney Lake is the second game in the Pixel Pulp series from developers LCB Game Studio. The game focuses principally on the summer adventures of three young teens: Jimmy, Christine and Doug, in the summer of 1954. Things begin somewhat normally: games of truth or dare, fishing by the lake, drive-in movies and dealing with bullies. However, things get strange as the gang comes upon a pale old man in a barn struggling to stay alive. Given the key art, I would imagine that you know where this story is going.

A quick note about LCB Game Studio’s first game in the Pixel Pulp series of games: Mothmen 1966. This game is another visual novel with a similar visual style that covers strange happenings from the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1966. Players who play both will be rewarded with a small story payoff, but I’m confident that this game can be played as a standalone title.

A Primer on the Story

The game’s story is good, but I was really surprised by how much I liked the narrative.

Varney Lake isn’t a horror game, but it’s also not My Best Friend is Vampire. It strikes this really delicate balance between lighthearted and dark. Much like the relationship between Eleven and Mike in Stranger Things, Liszt, the monstrous companion in the game, just seems really curious and thankful rather than nefarious and evil. While being vulnerable to the world around him, Liszt takes a protectionist role with Jimmy, Christine and Doug; even going as far as to tell them ghost stories, which was easily one of the game’s highlights.

Gameplay

Varney Lake is a pretty standard visual novel. During the course of a two-hour playthrough of the game, you’ll get to click through tons of dialogue and scene-setting while exploring the relationships between the main characters. All this while being put into a few really harrowing situations. Something surprising was the tonal difference between the two timelines in the game. Much like a television show like Stranger Things, as a player, you’ll get to experience the pre-teen whimsy of having little to no responsibilities during the summer while also struggling with some really heavy situations in another timeline. Much like other adventure games in the genre, some choices in the game will lead to additional outcomes, encouraging you to go back and play the game more than once.

Beyond moving through some of the Only Childs Club’s adventures, you’ll also be asked to take on a few mini-games, including fishing, dice hopscotch and solitaire ten. I thought that the dice and card games were actually very clever, but the controls for them on a controller were the tiniest bit cumbersome. I started playing the game on Steam Deck and actually switched over to PC exactly for this reason. If you have a choice, I would recommend playing this on a PC.

Graphics and Music

This game replicates old-school CGA graphics that you would find on old IBM PCs. Depending on the time of day, you’ll see different colours. During the daytime, you’ll see green, blue and yellow; at night, you’ll see a darker blue, green and black in the present. There’s very little animation in the game, and even when paired with the lack of fine detail, some of the art is quite memorable and striking, especially scenes containing Lizst. Some of these frames brought me back to the feeling I would get reading Goosebumps or Hardy Boys novels back in my childhood.

On the sound front, the game isn’t scored during every single moment of gameplay, but whenever there is music, it typically serves a purpose, either to underscore its importance of it or to add to the mood of the moment. I do wish that there was more music in the game, but what’s there is great.

Wrap-Up

Between great art, solid writing and a few surprising moments, Varney Lake is a game well worth the price of admission for adventure game fans that enjoy something dark, moody and a little supernatural.

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Final Score: 8/10

The game’s publisher provided a code for the game for the purposes of this review.