2025-01-29

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

no spoilers here, unless the general vibe of gameplay is a spoiler because I talk about that

Allow me to open with talking about Outer Wilds. A lot of people like to bring that game up and say “yeah it’s like Myst”, when that’s really very untrue. Like, I know they mean it is an adventure game with puzzles, but that’s a shallow comparison. The approach to puzzle design in Myst was something I always disliked. Each puzzle is a disconnected brain teaser that is mostly independent from the story. And even if the puzzle does have world-relevance, the contents of the puzzle itself don’t give you any information about the world or story. This was completely reversed in Riven, where the puzzles are exclusively world-relevant. I prefer to compare Outer Wilds to it instead, since it shares that puzzle design philosophy.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes sits somewhere in between the two approaches. There are lots of brain teaser puzzles, which only use information that is immediately available. But the game does something funny with all this: repetition. Key words, dates, character names, all get repeated in most of the puzzles you see. As the game progresses, these key phrases gain lore relevance. Revealing more about the story, reveals more small details for you to involve in puzzles.

This sounds tedious, and it would be without good pacing. Everything seems manageable, there’s only ever a couple things to think about. Puzzles have enough diversity that you always immediately know if you found the right clue. It’s usually pretty clear when you should or shouldn’t be paying attention to details. I’m really not sure how the game pulled off communicating this, just through camera angles and button prompts.

Oh yeah and the controls are also really cool. This entire game is controlled with directions and one button. That means, no camera controls, fixed camera angles. And not like Resident Evil 1, but like Code Veronica. Also, the camera angles are sensible to keep you from getting lost the instant an angle changes. Tank controls used to be a fix for this, so the player wouldn’t have to care about the camera. Instead, the Lorelei devs decided to not use psychotic camera angles and just make cam-relative controls work. These little design decisions are surprisingly obvious in this game.

For the one-button interactions: there’s a lot of different types of locks, puzzle boxes, or other miscellaneous interactables. They all have different interfaces, but the same one-button controls. When you press the button outside of a prompt, you bring up your menu, which you still navigate with directions and one button. There’s a lot of scrolling, but not too much to be tedious. The memories menu is categorized somewhat sensibly, which helps when digging through the log to cite a piece of lore. And you WILL be doing this in order to make progress.

This is a reading game. Literally, there is no voice acting, and everything you pick up has paragraphs of text that are important to read. Skimming through text will definitely hurt, and make the game take longer once you are stumped. Sometimes, important details are underlined in red, but this isn’t universal to all puzzles.

Difficulty in general seems to fluctuate. I can’t really gauge how “hardcore” a book of brain teasers is, so I won’t try. I was able to figure out the game to 95% completion with only a couple speed bumps. I think the biggest help was pacing for revealing new puzzles. It’s possible to pick up a hundred puzzles without solving them, but I don’t think a reasonable player would do this. And, when the puzzles are self-contained to rooms, all the information you need is right there. It’s really balanced to account for dumb moments, but not to reward wholly dumb people. The hardest puzzles (near the end, obviously) were pretty complex! But they definitely weren’t unsurmountable, I just needed a sheet of paper and a good memory of the game. You are recommended to play with a sheet of paper, and I would say that’s good advice, but use computer notes. There’s a lot of details or solutions that you may need to search for later, so if I were to use paper notes I’d be pretty annoyed trying to read my own handwriting.

Story, plot, themes, art, eh. It’s like a postmodern thing. But not really? It spends a lot of time criticizing the idea of the postmodern artist. I guess since we never figured out how to move past postmodern, it just started criticizing itself. Keep in mind when I say postmodernism, I mean the actual art movement, not some dumb video essay take about crap like Killer7 or Silent Hill 2, which have very little relevance to postmodern. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has no interest in that stuff, and makes this clear from the start. It’s better to approach it like an art film; there is DIRECTION here, you should OBSERVE it. Everything is nonlinear, it doesn’t take itself seriously, at least until you have a gun pointed at your head. It’s more important for you to know the details of the story, than the story itself, which is a really funny way to approach a narrative!

Nonlinearity was fun in this. I don’t think I’ll replay it, but there were many puzzles I solved in the late game, only to realize I could’ve solved them many hours earlier. This is definitely one of those games that will not be experienced the same way twice, and is better for it. It’s always easy to navigate around the game’s map, and backtracking never felt like a chore. You will frequently unlock shortcuts, but even without the shortcuts it’s a very small layout to memorize.

The game takes about 20 hours to beat. I did it in 18 but only got 95% completion. There’s a lot of puzzles that need to be completed for the main quest, so I’d be surprised if most players finished with less than 90% completion. For the whole game, I was really interested in the puzzles I was stuck on, and always had something new to check out. Again, really really good pacing, it knew exactly how much to reward me.

Score: 2/3. Despite my glowing review, it’s really not for everyone. If you want a coherent story, and actual gameplay outside reading random passages, skip this game. But if you are interested in weird storytelling, puzzles, or experimental game design, this game will easily win you over. My optimistic side says the average person is smart enough and open-minded enough to enjoy this game. Definitely check it out if you think it’s cool.