Varney Lake

There’s a specific kind of confidence in making a horror game where almost nothing jumps out at you. Varney Lake, the second entry in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulps anthology, trades in dread the old-fashioned way: through prose, pacing, and the slow rot of a childhood memory that doesn’t hold up under adult scrutiny.

The pedigree matters here. LCB is the two-person outfit of novelist Nico Saraintaris and artist Fernando Martinez Ruppel, and that division of labor shows in the best possible way. Saraintaris writes like someone who has actually read the mid-century pulps this series venerates — the clipped sentences, the lurid hooks, the moral murk. Ruppel, meanwhile, has built the entire visual identity around PETSCII-inspired pixel art, the character-set graphics of Commodore-era home computers. The result looks like nothing else on Steam or the eShop, and that’s not faint praise in a market drowning in generic 16-bit nostalgia.

The story splits across two timelines. In 1954, three kids — Jimmy, Doug, and Christine — spend a summer at the titular lake and come back insisting they met a vampire. In 1981, paranormal investigator Lou Hill (a returning thread from Mothmen 1966) works the cold case, and the game becomes an act of excavation: what did these children actually see, and what did they do about it?

Positioned as a self-contained story that connects thematically to Mothmen 1966 and Bahnsen Knights, Varney Lake occupies a niche the industry mostly abandoned — the short, authored, disposable-in-the-best-sense paperback experience. Its strengths and its caveats are both worth unpacking.

• Dual-Timeline Branching Narrative: The 1954 summer and the 1981 investigation interleave, with your choices coloring how the mystery resolves. It’s Choose Your Own Adventure structure executed with novelistic discipline rather than gimmickry.
• PETSCII-Inspired Art Direction: Every scene is composed from chunky, character-cell-derived pixel art evoking 80s home computers — a genuine aesthetic thesis, not a filter slapped on standard sprites.
• Synth-Tinged Atmospheric Score: A moody electronic soundtrack that does the tonal heavy lifting horror prose alone can’t, swelling and receding with the story’s pulse.
• Five-Language Localization: English, Spanish, German, French, and Japanese — unusually generous for a text-heavy indie at this scale, and critical for a game that lives or dies on its prose.

The Writing Is the Product

Let’s be clear about what you’re buying: Varney Lake is interactive fiction first and a game a distant second. If that sentence makes you wince, this isn’t your game. If it doesn’t, here’s the good news — the writing earns the format.

Saraintaris understands something most game writers don’t: pulp is a discipline, not an excuse. The prose is tight. Chapters end on hooks. Characters are sketched in two lines and then complicated over the course of the story. The vampire itself — named for Varney the Vampire, the 1840s penny dreadful that predates Dracula — is handled with restraint that borders on cruelty. The game is far more interested in what the creature does to three children’s friendship, and to the adults they become, than in fangs and capes. The 1954 sections carry a Stand by Me warmth that makes the encroaching darkness genuinely upsetting; the 1981 sections carry the hangover.

The Gameplay Loop, Such As It Is

You read. You choose. Occasionally you solve a light puzzle or play a hand of the in-fiction card game the kids obsess over — a small, smart touch that grounds the summer in something tactile. The branches are real but modest: your decisions color the outcome more than they rewrite it. This is the honest way to describe most branching fiction, and Varney Lake deserves credit for not pretending otherwise. The trade-off is obvious and worth circling: replay incentive is thin. A single sitting covers the spine of the story, and a second run mostly confirms that spine is fixed.

Is that a flaw? Partially. Some choice moments are designed to carry real weight — the game is built to make you complicit — but players trained by Disco Elysium or even Roadwarden to expect structural consequence will find the branches decorative in places. A tight, short runtime beats a padded long one, but the choice architecture occasionally promises more than it pays off.

Flow and Friction

The user experience is built to be nearly frictionless, which matters enormously in a reading-forward game. Text advances cleanly, choices are legible, chapter breaks land where a pulp paperback would put them. There’s an elegance to how the game trusts you to just read — no meters, no inventory anxiety, no busywork between story beats. The one friction point: a handful of puzzle interludes can fail-state you into brief repetition, and while they’re never hard, they occasionally interrupt momentum the prose works to build. It’s the interactive-fiction equivalent of a commercial break during the good scene.

Where It Sits in the Anthology

As the middle child of the Pixel Pulps trilogy, Varney Lake is the most emotionally grounded of the three. Mothmen 1966 was the proof of concept; Bahnsen Knights the most propulsive. This one is the saddest, and that’s a compliment. Lou Hill’s presence stitches the anthology together for returning players without gating anything for newcomers — the connective tissue is thematic, not mechanical, and the game is fully self-contained.

The art direction is the loudest thing about a very quiet game, and it deserves the attention. Ruppel’s PETSCII-derived compositions are constrained by design — blocky forms, limited palettes, dithered gradients — and the constraint produces striking, poster-like tableaus rather than detailed animation. Faces are masks. Shadows are slabs. When the game wants to unsettle you, it swaps one static image for a slightly wrong one, and the effect lands harder than most AAA jump scares because your imagination is doing the rendering.

The synth score is the right accomplice: patient, melancholy, and smart enough to go silent when the text needs the room. As a 2D game of this scope, it’s light on hardware, and the minimal UI suits the material — though the design lacks a proper chapter-select or scene-rewind for revisiting key choices; the absence stings in a game whose branches you might want to probe.

On Steam, mouse-driven choice selection is fine but unremarkable — this is a game to play leaned back, and it feels faintly wasted on a desk setup. Steam Deck owners are the real winners on the PC side; the game’s low demands and readable text make it a natural handheld title, which tells you something.

On Nintendo Switch, Varney Lake finds its natural habitat. A short, text-forward pulp novella is precisely what handheld mode was built for — this is a game for a couch, a train, or (fittingly) a summer evening outdoors. Button navigation through choices is designed to be quick, the chunky art scales down to the smaller screen without losing legibility, and the pick-up-put-down rhythm matches the chaptered structure. If you own both platforms, the Switch version is the one to get. It’s not close.

Varney Lake knows exactly what it is, and in 2020s game development that’s rarer than it should be. It’s a paperback you can hold down a button through — a brief, disciplined, melancholy vampire pulp wrapped in an art style with genuine point of view. Its limitations are real: the branches are thinner than the format suggests, and it’s over quickly. We rate it a solid, well-crafted effort that earns a recommendation for the right audience — readers who want a story, not a system. LCB Game Studio has built the interactive equivalent of the spinner rack at a 1950s drugstore, and Varney Lake is a good book on it. If the premise appeals to you at all, it will likely satisfy. A small game, and a good one.