Servant of the Lake Devlog 5 – The voices of Servant of the Lake 🗣️

Hello everyone, as promised, we are back with more behind-the-scenes from Servant of the Lake, some 6 weeks post-launch! Since Servant of the Lake is such a narrative-heavy Rusty Lake title, we wanted to give you all some time to experience the story and characters before we reveal some of the voices behind the characters you meet along the way!

Since the early days, before the Servant of the Lake Demo launched, we knew that we wanted way more narrative expressed directly through dialogue for this game. And while we know Bob Rafferty – the voice of basically everyone in Rusty Lake – could have 100% found a way to make it work in Servant of the Lake, we couldn’t let him shoulder so much work on his own! And we needed his full focus on reprising his role as Aldous Vanderboom! Not only did he once again deliver a memorable performance that was able to convey the mysteriously aloof nature of the eldest of the Vanderboom siblings, but he also captured, edited, and did the voice-over of most of our Servant of the Lake trailers. All of this while busy at work on his own music project, The Hate Eighties, creating Alternative Electro Powerpop Dream Punk Rock! Truly a man of many talents that we’ve been immensely fortunate to work with throughout the years and that we hope to continue working with for years to come!

Our next mention is just as vital to the overall tone of Servant of the Lake, as it’s the voice of the first character you meet as you board the carriage to start your new job at the Vanderboom estate: The Coachman! We didn’t really have a good idea of what we wanted from that role in the long run, but we needed someone to give us a quick performance for the Servant of the Lake Official Announcement Trailer back in August 2025! And so we reached out to Mike Wijdenbosch. We met Mike a while back when we filmed our official live-action launch trailer for The Past Within, in which he was one of the actors! Later, we also got to test out his voice acting chops while working on Underground Blossom, where he voiced the thief who steals the items in your inventory in the Bird Bridge Station level, whom you ultimately end up torturing later on in Soul Street Station for the location of your timepiece! 📎He was also part of our Best Kept Memory ARG as one of the many patients of Chad Brunswick 👀 And he delivered an impeccable, gravely monotone performance as The Coachman on his first try with his rendition of the monologue intro of Servant of the Lake, recorded on his phone. This first take was so good that we used the phone recording in the final version of the trailer! Since then, he’s been both the voice of the Coachman in-game, as well as in person for every offline event we’ve attended with our very own vintage carriage to showcase Servant of the Lake!

For the rest of our very impressive cast of voice actors, we needed help! As mentioned in our intro, we knew we wanted quite a strong, distinctive performance for all characters in Servant of the Lake. So we needed a true professional to help us cast these roles accordingly, and that’s exactly how we got in touch with DB Cooper, who helped us host auditions and choose the voices for the maid, William and who eventually ended up voicing the one and only, the ambitious Alexandra Vanderboom! While originally auditioning for the voice of the maid, once we heard her performance, we immediately associated her voice with what we imagined the character of Alexandra Vanderboom would sound like while writing her character! And while the tone and demeanour of DB Cooper’s audition as the maid was completely different to the performance delivered in the role of Alexandra Vanderboom, we could already almost anticipate how well suited she’d be for the role of the youngest Vanderboom sibling! And we’re very happy we trusted our gut feeling, and that she was also willing to go along with our vision because not only did she embody everything we imagined Alexandra to be through her voice alone, but she also discovered the perfect voice for the maid!

And this perfectly segues us into talking more about another one of our very first characters that you, as a player, meet as early as playing the Servant of the Lake demo! Let’s meet the voice behind one of the fan-favourite characters in the game, the maid, Kate, voiced by the incredible Kara Edwards! Some of you might have unknowingly already heard her voice in various cartoons, anime and other popular games, as she is best known for voicing Goten, Gotenks and Videl in Dragon Ball Z, Toko, Lil and Lily Enstomach in One Piece, Bubble Girl in My Hero Academia, Chihiro in Danganronpa, and many other voice acting projects! With such a stacked portfolio, it comes as no surprise that she knocked the role of Kate out of the park! She took the role and elevated the innocence, goodness and resilience of the character we wrote and managed to instantly catapult the character of Kate into the hearts of our players!

Last but not least, we have another fan favourite performance, that of the tremendous Paul Guyet as William Vanderboom. From the very beginning we knew we wanted William to be this loud, boisterous, grandiose character whose presence alone filled the room! And we received quite a few very, very good auditions from many incredibly talented voice actors, and for a long time we were quite undecided on who we should go for. We already had the perfect voice for every other character in Servant of the Lake, but we could not settle on a William. And then Paul auditioned, and the rest is, as they say, history! He just checked all the boxes and fulfilled all the criteria we had for this character! And on top of delivering such a fantastic performance, he was also more than happy to help us create goofy promotional material like the “Let me in” meme we posted 2 days before the launch! He continued to share his love for the project with gameplay recordings of Servant of the Lake, being very active and receptive to our players’ appreciation and just an overall great person to work with!

And that is pretty much a recurring theme for everyone part of our incredible cast of Servant of the Lake voice actors! It’s been an incredible journey working with such talented actors, and seeing them all bring these characters that we’ve visualised in our heads for so long to life has been a wonderful experience through and through. Once more, we want to share a heartfelt thank you to everyone who made this project possible, and we truly hope that this passion has translated to you, the player! And of course, a huge thank you to all of you who played and shared your love for Servant of the Lake with us! We’ve hit so many incredible milestones thanks to your incredible support, and we hope to continue to delight you with more projects in the future! Until then, we hope you’ve enjoyed this entry in our #SotLDevlog series! We have one more coming your way soon with some more insight into how we created some of the puzzles in Servant of the Lake! Till then, we hope you have an amazing rest of your week and are excited for #laketober2026!