Switch, PC, Steam Deck
$24.99
Simogo
17 hours long
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a puzzle game where you explore a hotel to unravel the mystery of why you’ve been summoned there. The puzzles vary from simple brainteasers and optical illusions to sprawling mazes and multi-room conundrums, each unlocking more of the hotel and the story.
It’s incredibly stylish and mannered; the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad is a primary inspiration, visible in the game’s fixed camera angles and challenging control schemes, not to mention the story’s elliptical dialogue and disorienting sense of time.
It is hard to have a conventionally “fun” time under these circumstances. Any challenging puzzle game will alternate between moments of frustration and elation, but the last time my emotions swung as wildly as they did here was when I read The Three-Body Problem. I started thinking it was an instant classic; halfway through, I detested it; and by the end it’d become one of my favourite sci-fi novels of all time.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever played, which is precisely why it’s so interesting.
The game starts with Lorelei standing in front of a car. I waited for a cutscene to start – the low camera angle and cinematic colour grading and film grain all pointed in that direction – but nothing happened. After a while I pushed the controller stick and Lorelei moved off frame into a new location. “Very Brechtian,” I chuckled to myself wisely.
While the fixed camera perspectives in each location are reminiscent of Alone in the Dark, the controls are mostly intuitive. Objects you can interact with are highlighted and labelled when you’re nearby, and pressing a button typically shows them in close-up. I should say the button, because Lorelei and the Laser Eyes acts as if your controller is an old-school Atari joystick with just a single button. Why? I can only conclude this is a conscious design choice to evoke a particularly deliberate form of game-playing. Some people have found this enraging; I was charmed, but only because I saved my ire for other perceived insults against game design.
When I interacted with the car, silent movie-style intertitles informed me, “It’s locked”; trying to leave the scene entirely resulted in “It’s too late to go back.” This game isn’t aiming for realism – quite the opposite. The instruction manual is in the car’s glove compartment; a noticeboard is merely a written description of the items on it; textures and wireframes shift unsettlingly; one of the first conversations you overhear is about whether the name “Laser Eyes” is too much.
Plenty of games break the fourth wall, but they’re rarely as polished as this. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes makes things smooth when it wants to: walking through the hotel takes barely any time; there are zero loading screens, even on the ageing Nintendo Switch; mechanical and computer interfaces are deliciously tactile; and everything important you need to remember is immediately saved in your “Photographic Memory” or as part of your “Mental Notes” list of things to do.
The first puzzle sees you unlock the front gate to the hotel, which requires a four digit code – the present year. A letter delivered by a dog tells you the answer is in a letter you already received; that letter is dated to 1962 but is from a year ago, so the answer is 1963.
This pseudo-logic sets the tone for all of Lorelei and the Laser Eye’s puzzles, which is to say: none of it really makes much sense. Other games like Professor Layton and my own Perplex City, not to mention the entire genre of serial killer movies, justifies this by imagining individuals and societies who are obsessed with puzzles, and this game is no different (more on this in my Viewfinder post).
Where it departs from the crowd, however, is in its militant abstraction. When I designed hundreds of puzzles for Perplex City, I would sometimes adapt classics by changing their framing but retaining the underlying rules. The right framing can make puzzles easier to comprehend, which is why logical deduction puzzles will often say something like “What colour coat was the suspect in Paris wearing that night?” rather than “what ID goes with sequence Y in grid C?”, yet Lorelei and the Laser Eye makes the brave choice of sticking with the latter for many of its puzzles. “You want a puzzle game? This is a puzzle game!” I imagine them saying.
There are so many puzzles, however, that it’s unfair to classify them all that way. Shortcuts can be opened throughout the hotel by solving standard brainteasers:
I particularly liked the installation art puzzles. Not only do they use 3D space and perspective inventively, but they have the aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s avant-garde down pat, with video art and CRTs and wry labels:
Both of these types of puzzles are highly contained, in the sense that it’s clear all of the information required to solve them is within a single screen or room. Where the game falters is when its puzzles require you to pull together information from multiple rooms or sources. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle; in fact, larger and more complex puzzles can be more satisfying to solve.
In a game overflowing with strange symbols and names and numbers, however, it’s easy to stumble across a puzzle that looks straightforward to solve, but cannot be solved until much later on. Unlike other frustrations, I don’t think this is deliberate. You aren’t penalised for wrong answers, and although there’s no built-in hint system, the game is very aware players will “cheat” by looking up answers online and addresses this with randomised puzzle design. Walkthroughs can tell you the principles of a puzzle, but you still need to do the (enjoyable!) legwork to get the answer.
In fact, some of the game’s most interesting puzzles seem to rely on cheating. One strand sees you teleported into a diorama and asked a question like, “How many wine glasses were on the table?” on pain of death. Naturally, I took photos every time this happened. This didn’t make it easy, though: as you walk around the dioramas, the camera angle (deliberately?) occludes crucial details, forcing you to either take lots of photos or actually write words and numbers down, like a savage. There’s an art to making puzzles that can withstand conventional cheating: back in 2009, I created the Hive Mind Challenge pub quiz with Philip Trippenbach, which explicitly allowed phones.
Another problem with complex puzzles that require cross-referencing multiple sources and locations is that even after you’ve figured out what you need to do, assembling the information can be time-consuming and error-prone. Because I’m impatient, I can’t stand this. Whenever I realised I would have to backtrack through a maze or climb three floors to retrieve another bit of information, I wanted nothing else but to leave the hotel forever. This was especially aggravating during retro game puzzles using tank controls or weird visual effects.
Away from the heat of the moment, I would generously call this “productive frustration”, which could be a subtitle for the game as a whole. Many games will nudge you if there’s a clue you’re missing or a place you haven’t visited for a while, but this one is happy for you to wallow in confusion. Since Lorelei and the Laser Eyes gives players a lot of freedom in choosing which order to tackle its many puzzles, you might have half a dozen puzzles on the go at once. Fine, except that solutions to puzzles are often required as inputs to others. If, like me, you’re playing only an hour at a time, it’s easy to forget entire strands of inquiry and wander around aimlessly trying to remember what you can do next.
I have a theory that it’s hard for puzzle games to become more than the sum of their parts due to the discordance between the theme and logic of their puzzles and that of the overall world and story. Games like Professor Layton, essentially a bunch of wildly varied standalone puzzles, can overcome this with good story and characters and a sense of dialogue and exploration and action. Of course, if you have enough of those things, you become an adventure game.
Games with environmental or physics-based puzzles can manage the integration better, Portal being the best example, not simply because it has a good story, but because the puzzles are all of a similar theme that doesn’t require the player to reboot their brain every five minutes from, say, logic to wordplay. But this doesn’t guarantee success: The Witness and Viewfinder, despite having good puzzles, were let down by their storytelling.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes combines all these elements – story, dialogue, exploration, environmental puzzles, and standalone puzzles – in a way that fits beautifully when you take a step back, but with the side-effect of impeding flow when you’re in the moment. My sessions were split almost evenly between “annoyed wandering looking for something I’ve missed” and “exuberant exploration and puzzle-solving.” The highs were so high, the lows were even lower. During my wanderings, I’d repeatedly check the percentage of the game I’d completed every time I did anything at all, seeing it tick up by 0.2% at a time as I unlocked shortcuts and stumbled across things I’d missed.
It’s not like the designers don’t know how to design flow. Their previous game, Sayonara Wild Hearts, is as good an arcade game as you’ll ever find. So, once again, I wonder if this is all on purpose – if they wanted to problematise flow.
“But other than that, Adrian, how was the game?”
I know I’ve complained incessantly about the puzzles and their structure, but I was enchanted by practically everything else. The more I learned of the story, the more I was enchanted. The mystery revolves around Renzo, a famous 1960s film director aiming to overthrow the industrial entertainment complex. When he discovers Lorelei’s early computer-based art, he recruits her to create a revolutionary new work, a performance without an audience – not unlike a video game.
It’s an intoxicating dream, one doomed to failure, arguably even within this game itself. The struggle to reconcile cinematic storytelling with the demand for interaction and agency emerges in the cutscenes, which are like a visual novel if it were made by a New Wave filmmaker – figures dance in animated loops and speak in subtitles, stuck until the player presses to advance. It doesn’t hurt that this is literally economical from a production standpoint, either.
The writing is witty and self-aware. They pull off the trick of making biographies and magazine articles and exhibition labels simultaneously entertaining, revealing, and true to the era and spheres they depict. There’s a refreshing lack of sentimentality, a chilliness to proceedings that balances the emotion; appropriately, Paul Auster is an inspiration. These days, the success of a game’s story seems to be measured in the volume of tears it generates, so I’m glad to see Lorelei and the Laser Eyes buck the trend.
There is a long history of art that is meant to be difficult to understand, art eschewing the slickness of illusion that hyperrealism strives for. The goal is to establish a “critical distance” so the audience isn’t carried away by the artwork and remains able to question what they’re seeing.
The way I choose to interpret Lorelei and the Laser Eyes’ frustrations – the single button, the lack of helpful nudges, the endless backtracking, the difficult controls – is that they’re intended to frustrate. I caught myself wondering if I was too used to being careless when playing games, whether that was limiting what I was willing to experience.
If this were made by anyone other than Simogo, I might be harsher, but I know what this team is capable of. They know how to make slick, frustration-free games. They’re seemingly unconstrained by time and money. Their followers are so loyal, they don’t even see these frustrations.
At the end, you input three long strings into a computer. I had the answer, but I kept failing and couldn’t figure out which of the many symbols I’d entered wrong. After my third attempt failed, I couldn’t bear another trek, so I gave up and watched the last ten minutes on YouTube. It was a fitting conclusion for a game straining to hold together cinema and gameplay and art and commerce.
mssv 