Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Genre: Graphic Adventure / Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, released in 2024 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a Graphic Adventure with extremely pronounced Puzzle elements, to the point where you could almost consider this primarily a Puzzle game. This game has players take the role of a sunglasses-wearing woman responding to an invitation to a remote hotel by an eccentric artist, who has apparently filled the place with a wide variety of puzzles. Through solving these puzzles and exploring the hotel, players seek to solve the questions the game poses: Who is the woman? Who is the man and what is your relationship to him? What is the man trying to accomplish here? And just what the heck is going on in this freaky place?

While Lorelei and the Laser Eyes isn’t quite a Horror game, there is definitely an unsettling tone running throughout the game, with a nebulous menace that seems to be present throughout the game’s environs, yet still all veiled in the plausible innocence of an elaborate art project – bright red spatters throughout the hotel that might be either blood or paint, a figure on the ground that could be a dead body or a realistic piece of art, a shattered mirror that might have been destroyed in a deadly struggle or some sort of artistic statement… while the game does have answers regarding what all of this is, many of those answers are kept away from the player until the very end.

Much of this game’s bizarre setting and its nebulous but eerie and seemingly malevolent tone are thanks to an absolutely brilliant presentation. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is presented almost entirely in 3D visuals presented with monochrome tones, but throughout the game you’ll see various elements highlighted in reds that often have a bright neon glow. This tends to happen more frequently as you get closer to the game’s more surreal and reality-bending elements, and when things get particularly intense, your character’s sunglasses will glow bright red as well.

This is an incredibly distinctive visual element that truly sets this game apart from just about everything else I’ve seen, but even when the game isn’t pushing deep into its neon-toned highlights, you can still find subtle elements of the surreal all around you, with geometry that seems artificially polygonal at times, even in some cases being little more than a wire frame construct, and with textures that waver and jump around, as if the world within the game is a poorly pieced-together abstract reconstruction. And make no mistake, this is not to say that the game itself is poorly pieced-together – your character herself is well-detailed, and there’s a clearly deliberate design behind the game’s apparent flaws.

In short, this game looks absolutely stunning, with an outstanding artistic vision.

Oddly, I don’t feel I can say the same about the sound, which is particularly odd since Developer Simogo’s prior game, Sayonara Wild Hearts, was a musical delight, sweeping the musical awards in the eShopperReviews 2019 Game Awards. That’s not to say Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is bad when it comes to sound, but it generally tends to stick with a far more atmospheric soundtrack, punctuated by old instrumental music on LP records from time to time.

However, beyond the story and presentation, the clear focus here is on the puzzles, and depending on how you feel about puzzles, this game will either be heaven for you, or an absolute hell.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes features a wide variety of puzzles, many of them quite clever and really making the player stop and think about what information the game could be looking for. Right from the start, the game warns players that they’ll want to have a pencil and paper handy, both to take notes and to work out the math for some of these puzzles (yeah, there’s a lot of math puzzles in this game). Thankfully, the game makes it a point to highlight words and bits of information that are particularly important, though you will also need to seek out information in documents and reference books you find as well, and these are not made quite as plain.

I’ve seen this game described as being like the original Resident Evil but without the zombies, and to some extent that seems fair, although that’s really just the start. Lorelei and the Laser eyes takes one look at the sort of puzzles you see in Resident Evil and says “well isn’t that quaint”, absolutely flooding the game with these puzzles, and then making the game itself one big puzzle.

However, if you’re more of a puzzle novice, or if you’re looking for a more casual puzzle experience, you’ll likely get more than you bargained for here. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes does not hold the player’s hand at all, and while you’re given access to a readout of the remaining puzzles and secrets yet to be resolved in each section of the game, you’re not given any sort of hints or help in solving them. Even worse, the game doesn’t indicate to the player whether they’re even in possession of all the tools and knowledge they need to solve a puzzle, meaning that you could struggle with a puzzle for hours without realizing that you’re missing a necessary component.

There are issues here beyond the puzzles, too. The game seems to be attempting to do something clever by making everything controlled via the analog stick/D-Pad and a single button, with all interactions and menus using only this button. While this does work, it doesn’t work especially well, forcing players to figure out what acts as a “exit” button or menu option and then navigate to it rather than simply letting them use a second button to exit out of things. This can be needlessly confusing, tedious, and time-consuming, especially when the only way to exit out of one of the game’s many combination lock puzzles is to move the cursor to the shackle and test your non-solution, which takes extra time to do.

What’s more, if you messed up and accidentally input the wrong solution before selecting the shackle, the game will go through the motions and then boot you out of the puzzle when all you wanted to do is go back and make one simple change. I can see wanting to keep players from brute-forcing solutions to puzzles here, but I don’t think frustrating them with delays and tedium is the right way to do that.

In the end, I think Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is going to be a game that some players love and some absolutely hate. The game’s unique artistic style and well-crafted puzzles will thrill players looking for an original, challenging Puzzle game, but more casual players or those who don’t relish the idea of having to jot down notes to solve puzzles are likely to recoil at the higher challenge level and lack of accessibility here. And no matter what sort of player you are I think you’ll be frustrated by this game’s overly-simplified controls. Still, for those who this game clicks with, I expect it to really click. Puzzle junkies, take notice.

tl;dr – Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a Graphic Adventure game with an extremely strong focus on its Puzzle gameplay, with some really excellent puzzle design that will thrill seasoned puzzle-solvers looking for something challenging and original, but that might cause more casual puzzlers to balk. Add to this an absolutely amazing visual presentation and less-than-amazing controls, and you have something of a mixed bag that some players will absolutely love while others will hate it. Still, I do think the positives outweigh the negatives here, and the game’s target audience will likely be truly delighted with this game.

Grade: B

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Puzzle Game, Best Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel, Most Original, Best Graphical Style

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