Lou's Lagoon, a Peaceful Experience That Still Needs Time in the Oven

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Running a delivery service via plane on a tropical island might not have been something you've thought about before, but that's exactly what you'll be doing in Lou's Lagoon! This relaxing and peaceful open-world life sim puts you in a beautiful environment and tasks you with completing delivery tasks, expanding the business, and finding your lost Uncle Lou.

Lou's Lagoon - Gameplay Impressions

The preview build of Lou's Lagoon that I got to try was pretty short, essentially just showing you the basic gameplay mechanics of the game. After a storm, your uncle's island has been ruined and he has gone missing, and when you arrive you have to complete a few short quests in order to find the parts to repair the plane and get the delivery service back up and running. The whole demo was about 30 minutes long.

The first thing that strikes you is how beautiful and peaceful the island looks. This is truly meant to be a game where you're supposed to relax and take your time. There are no time pressures and no enemies. You can just explore the islands, harvest resources, and craft and cook your way through progression.

As you explore the islands, you'll encounter different resources that you can gather, such as Scrap to repair the plane and Driftwood to repair broken bridges and stairs on the island. You'll also be able to gather food from bushes and trees which you can use to cook with, although the benefit of doing this isn't exactly explained in the preview build.

Sadly, the other thing that stood out to me about the game besides the relaxing beauty of it, was the bugs. The first bug that's noticeable is that although the game tells you to use the D-Pad to navigate menus, the D-Pad doesn't work most of the time, forcing you to use the analog stick.

Secondly, if you go to the options menu and then leave it, while you're playing the game, you are still controlling the options menu, even if you can't see it. It's not immediately obvious, but I left my selection on the Resolution option and closed the menu, and whenever I walked left or right, the game's resolution adjusted. It's a pretty huge oversight, and one I'm surprised was left in for a build sent to the press. It was pretty confusing for me at first, as I was unknowingly altering the Window Mode of the game as I was playing, causing a repeated flashing of the screen to black as the game switched between windowed and fullscreen.

There were also miscellaneous bugs such as the camera in cutscenes and gameplay sometimes going underground so you can see through the world, and the main menu completely disappearing if you press the "Select/View" button for some reason.

While I think Lou's Lagoon has promise, it does feel pretty unpolished right now, more of an Alpha than a Beta as they state, it's hard to get too much of a feel for the game, as it's a parcel delivery game and the demo ends just before you actually deliver your first parcel.

Lou's Lagoon - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Lou's Lagoon pushes the Steam Deck pretty hard. We can run at 1280x800 resolution and avoid any black bars, and controller support is pretty good, aside from some issues using the D-Pad for the menus, I had to use the analog stick for the most part.

The UI, while generally ok, does have some smaller text that is hard to read on the Steam Deck.

I ran the game with a 30 FPS frame limit and no TDP limit.

Sadly, right now, the graphics quality settings in the options menu seem to have little to no effect on the resources the game requires to run. The game does tend to run at 30 FPS most of the time. But the game will drop into the mid-20s in heavily forested areas on the main island, and when flying the plane itself.

There are also some stutters occasionally, which are more distracting, but, given the relaxing/casual nature of the game, it's not a dealbreaker.

Power draw tended to be around 15W-22W on my Steam Deck OLED, with temperatures ranging from 65C-75C depending on my location.

Hopefully, the full release will have more optimizations and might make the different graphics options actually affect performance.

Final Thoughts

I do hope that Lou's Lagoon succeeds and gets the attention it deserves from both the developers and the players. The very short press build, coupled with the bugs and rather poor optimization do leave me concerned about what the game will be like on release. This is a demo version of the game, so performance will most likely improve with the full release, but it's still worth mentioning.

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