Review: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Where do I even begin with a game like Lorelei? Simogo's follow-up to Sayonara Wild Hearts goes in the complete opposite direction, switching from a bright, colorful, music arcade game to a monochromatic, moody puzzle game. And boy, is it a fucking weird game. Lorelei, at its core, is essentially a 12 hour escape room that takes place in and around the Hotel Letztes Jahr. Your character, the eponymous Lorelei Weiss, has been summoned to the hotel by the eccentric director Renzo Nero for some kind of artsy exhibition. Inside the hotel, there are locked doors and puzzles everywhere that feel more at home in something like Virtue's Last Reward than any sort of "proper" puzzle game (although The Witness occasionally comes close), and that's before we even start talking about the game-spanning maze puzzles that layer on top of the core experience. Suffice to say that for a game that is fundamentally just "Resident Evil, but with no zombies", there is a lot going on here.
Of course, the mechanics don't really tell the whole story, any more than saying "The Witness is a game about drawing lines on puzzle grids." This is a game about vibes, and suffice to say that they are on full display at all times. This is important, because the plot of Lorelei is...threadbare, to put it lightly. This is not to say the game doesn't have a story, because it has lore for days - doubly so if you're willing to invest your hard-earned American Dollars into the game's many optional items and experiences. But on a moment to moment basis, there is very little to explain why we're doing...anything that happens in the game, really. Some of the game's puzzle do relate back to the story, and these are generally the stronger ones, but for the most part, you spend your time exploring the hotel and solving puzzles for the sake of doing so.
Mechanically, Lorelei's puzzle variety falls more on the "breadth" side of the scale than "depth". The game has more than its fair share of "look at a thing and enter a number on a keypad" puzzles, and even the ones that aren't are usually some variation on it - usually "figure out how these buttons correspond to numbers and enter it". Very early game example: there's a room with a note that has a little bit of flavor text and gives you a year to serve as your clue. However, the safe nearby doesn't have standard buttons - instead, it has a bunch of seemingly random shapes arranged in a rectangular grid. The puzzle is realizing that each of those shapes correspond to a number via the number of squares that each shape is made of. Another one just has four buttons, and you enter the solution by pressing each button the same number of times as the number you want to input.
When the game does get weird, though, it gets weird. Around the 1/3 mark or so, you unlock access to the Crimson Labyrinth, a maze where you collect literal chunks of it and free what we termed the "puzzle cops" - floating guys with a glowing piece of the maze instead of a head. They occasionally appear around the hotel, and force you into a scenario where you must study a scene and answer a question about some mundane detail within, lest they greet you with a bullet to the head and send you back to your last save point. Similarly, the Trivia Maze puts you up against the Brothers of The Third Eye, who ask you questions about the game's assorted lore and flavor text under threat of death (though thankfully you can check your notes before you answer them). This culminates in a finale sequence that I won't spoil, but does a really good job of tying everything together in the end!
If I do have any complaints about the story, it's that the game basically sidelines Lorelei for...more or less the entirety of its runtime. Renzo is the star of the show, and while they've done a fantastic job of making him a hateable, pretentious auteur, it very much comes at Lorelei's expense. Throughout the adventure, he makes a habit of showing up, making a scene in whatever room you happen to be in, then disappearing again once you get control. He steals the scene, quite literally, and Lorelei never says a word to him, even when it becomes clear that she may be in danger. In fact, up until about the 80-90% mark, it's easy to forget that we're playing as Lorelei at all, for all the relevance that it has to the plot. You could replace her with a cardboard cutout and almost nothing about the experience would change.
On a somewhat similar note, my understanding is that the game's controls are...controversial, I suppose? You navigate the hotel via tank controls, which are a tad annoying at times but otherwise not a big deal. It also uses a single button for menuing, which is very weird for the first hour or so. You'd think that "escape" or some other key would be a designated cancel button (and I'm 1000% sure someone has modded that in), but in order to get out of any menus, you have to navigate up to the included "X" in the top corner. Would this have been trivial to include? Absolutely. Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Not in the slightest. I adjusted to it almost immediately, and it tripped me up like, once at the start of each session. Having a button for pulling up the map would have been greatly appreciated, though.
At the end of the day, it's hard to assign a rating like "good" or "bad" to a game that is so thoroughly the product of an artistic vision like this. It's definitely more good than bad, although the parts of it that are bad drag pretty hard. Complaints about the plot aside, the mazes are also really tedious to go through, and both of them absolutely require a full navigation at least twice each. The midgame drags a lot, as you get ferried from puzzle to puzzle without any real reason as to why, but it does manage to end on a high note - including an absolute banger credits theme, as one might expect from the makers of Sayonara Wild Hearts. It's definitely not for everyone, but you could do a lot worse for $20, and it makes no effort to hide what it is. If you like what you see in the trailers, give it a shot, because it's absolutely worth a playthrough if you match its vibe.