Digging into the past can sometimes be emotionally exhausting. In the introduction, the narrator of Lake Adventure writes that the discs from this game – which he programmed himself decades ago – fell into his hands by chance and a revision seems to be a task of fate.
Eddie Hughes accomplishes his autobiographical journey by inserting explanatory comments into the game. These are intended to gain understanding about the true feelings of the real boy – i.e. Eddie himself – who stands behind the game's protagonist and as such is just the imaginary version.
The boy protagonist sets off on a trip across the lake to a birthday party. During the preparations at his parents' house, sporadic flashbacks occur, reminding the adult Eddie of the painful experiences he had as a 13-year-old when he lost his younger sister Erica, who had leukemia.
In the game, young Eddie has shut out these feelings behind a nice summer's day idyll. Only details such as the fact that the party is in honour of a neighbouring child with the same name as his deceased sister, or scenes in which a boy of the same age is beaten up by him, allow them to shine through. The adult-Eddie confirms such assumptions and now bears this past time of pain with humour.
On a meta-level, Lake Adventure ultimately attempts to summarise all the manifested adolescent processing patterns in an overarching metaphor, as expressed in the title image: the boat is reflected in the surface of the lake. The lost sister from the past is the daughter of the present. Despite the same name, the loss remains. The state of the boat does not change just because we are looking back.
A hard lesson that triggers an emotional outburst to Eddie. At the end, existential doubt arises as to whether dealing with the past makes sense at all. This is obviously the point of inner reflection that the author B.J. Best wanted to highlight and thus sets his work apart from purely voyeuristic consternation-pieces ('Feelies') in a good way.
Not only the induced statement alone is remarkable, but also the way it is conveyed to the reader. The in-game puzzles of Lake Adventure are like real-life stations that are reflected by an inner monologue from the future. These allow the author to transform the imagery of a 13-year-old into meaningful scenes. A literary twist which let shine another unexpected facette on the surface of the old text adventure genre.
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