I don’t remember when, exactly, but at some point last year, my brother told me about this game called Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. I happened to have my Switch in my hands at the time and immediately looked it up on the shop. Browsing through the screenshots, I could see a game that took place in a mansion with fixed camera angles. That was enough for me to hit the “Buy” button.
Now, months later, I’ve finally played the game. And what a game! Much like the other Simogo games I’ve played, Year Walk and Sayonara Wild Hearts, Lorelei left a huge impression on me. But for completely different reasons! Year Walk scared the piss out of me and had an unforgettable twist during the second half, and Sayonara Wild Hearts’ soundtrack is one of my favourites of all-time. Lorelei, on the other hand, is a gigantic series of interconnected puzzles with a mind-bending story woven throughout them. And, man, that’s just like the perfect recipe for a game for me.
So having played through the whole game to 100% completion, I’m honestly still not entirely sure what the story is trying to tell me. You start off having just arrived at a creepy old hotel/art museum at the behest of its owner. I had presumed that your character was the titular Lorelei, but then you read about Lorelei in notes and actually meet the woman herself, which kind of debunked that notion. But then you get even farther in and some things happen that start to make you think: oh wait, maybe I am Lorelei after all? Are there two Loreleis? Only the ending can tell!
Aside from figuring out what kind of temporal shenanigans may or may not be happening at this hotel, there’s also this sort of sub-plot about art. The dude who invited you to the hotel in the first place, Renzo, is an artist; his medium of choice being film. In notes you read that he’s kind of a kook and that his films are way past avant-garde, and his life goal is trying to make the purest form of art possible, all to spit in the face of Mammon (read: commercialism). The entire game is built around this fascination with art, from the black and white and red graphics to the way the story is told in fractured, often confusing notes and cutscenes, and it even leaks into a lot of the puzzle designs.
Now, you might not think that puzzles are overly artistic, and a lot of them aren’t. In fact, most of them revolve around reading notes to figure out how devices work or simply solving number puzzles to learn the passcode to certain doors. But then you remember that the whole mansion is basically just one giant piece of interactive art, and all of those puzzles have been designed and put there by one or both of the characters who inhabit the hotel. Or maybe the previous owner? It’s still not entirely clear to me.
There’s even one fairly substantial series of puzzles that’s built entirely around art installations and how you view them. These installations provide the combinations to several puzzle boxes that are themselves a separate art installation, which is maybe the masterwork of Lorelei herself? And then you get clues from those puzzle boxes to keywords that will unlock clues for yet another puzzle! It’s really nice that that whole set of interconnected puzzles is tied into the story, makes it feel a lot more satisfying to solve.
As a game that’s built almost entirely around puzzles, there is definitely a wide range of difficulty, as one might expect. Some of the puzzles (particularly the ones that open shortcut doors) are mindlessly simple, and others are likely to stump you for days on end (I had that problem a couple times). There are some puzzles that have very simple solutions, but how you come about those solutions can be maddeningly opaque. For example, the set of puzzles that unlocks the game’s maps are available from basically the very start, and the key to unlocking them is also accessed early, but I was at roughly 60% completion before it occurred to me to put the two together.
Suffice it to say I had an absolute blast with this one. Simply wandering the mansion to search for puzzles and clues is fun, and the sheer number of “A-ha!” moments I had kept the dopamine on a constant flow. The ending is fantastic: both jaw-dropping and bittersweet. And of course, any game that essentially demands that I have a pen and paper on hand to keep notes is a winner in my book. I played several great games like that last year (Animal Well and Tunic, to name a couple), and Lorelei definitely measures up. It might even be my favourite of the bunch because it’s got such a weird flavour to it, which aligns perfectly with my tastes. Somehow the cutscenes and story gave off a strong Killer7 vibe, even though the two games are nothing alike, and I deeply appreciate that.
I wholeheartedly give Lorelei and the Laser Eyes my stamp of approval and certify it as TE’s Game of the Month, January 2025. Not that that’s a thing I’m doing now.
