While solving puzzles, I found myself in various strange situations Lorelei and the laser eyes. I spent some time staring at a mid-century movie poster for a documentary about a rotting cat, debating whether I should focus on the running time or the release date. I dug up old hotel plans and deciphered the math of dead architects. I’ve been playing a handful of ASCII-style PC games to receive messages from a 19th century wizard who calls me his sister. I found some building blocks and stuck them into the walls of a secret cathedral. I slipped between realities, traversing a labyrinth that crumbled beneath my feet. I saw a woman fall to her death. I wondered if that woman was me.
Lorelei and the laser eyes is a third-person noir detective game set in a haunted hotel with impossible architecture and a gruesome history. The hallways are full of logic puzzles about wizards, labyrinths, astrology, filmmaking, mausoleums, and physics, and it’s not even clear why the protagonist is there in the first place. With artifacts from the 19th century, set pieces from the 1960s and technology from the 2010s, it’s hardly clear When She is there. Disorientation is a central tenet of the game and leads to a feeling of loneliness that is oppressive and extremely unsettling.
It is also strengthening. The hotel in Lorelei is a playground full of mysteries with no predetermined path for players, and in every scene there is a rich density of puzzles and lore to unravel. Although I still have no idea where the game is taking me, I rarely felt lost. It’s kind of like that tunic In that respect, it also feels like something David Lynch directed, and visually the game resembles that Kentucky Route Zero or Sin City. There’s really no direct comparison for this Lorelei and the laser eyes. Playing feels like nothing I’ve experienced before.
The actual gameplay in Lorelei is straightforward: walk around and press a button (on a gamepad, literally any button) to interact with objects that glow when you’re near. Otherwise, pressing a button brings up a menu containing the protagonist’s statistics, inventory, reference materials, unsolved puzzles, and handheld gaming system. Her stats include caffeine, stress, temperature, cash, and bladder tracker, her inventory includes a tampon, and the hotel provides both coffee machines and bathrooms that she can actually use. I haven’t discovered a gameplay reason for the toilets or the tampon yet, but I enjoyed the fact that they exist and I’ll keep trying to insert the tampon into every statue and keyhole until it finally works. If it ever does. With Lorelei and the laser eyesyou just don’t know until you know.
LoreleiBuilt around Roman numerals, Greek letters, zodiac signs, and 24-hour clocks, the world is filled with puzzle boxes, keyboard codes, logic puzzles, mazes, image reconstructions, memory tests, and other extremely satisfying puzzle-solving mechanics. Even then, part of the game’s genius lies in the actions that take place off-screen. Lorelei and the laser eyes is intended to be played with a notebook and pen nearby, and I don’t recommend starting without these tools. Yes, even you, the person who just scoffed and thought, “I I don’t have to write anything down.” I promise you will.
Lorelei There are definitely puzzles with easy solutions, but the majority of questions are challenging and rely on previous answers, lots of reading, object manipulation, deduction, and creative thinking. The simple puzzles ensure a constant release of endorphins, especially in the early stages of the game. They also provide a guide for solving the more difficult puzzles: trust your instincts. When you think of something, try it, no matter how outlandish it may seem. Lorelei and the laser eyes rewards curiosity and the game is incredibly adept at seeding concepts that will still be useful hours later.
Around seventh period I hit my mental wall for the first time, and then it happened Lorelei‘s pace shifted downward for a moment. I went from constantly – but not effortlessly – solving puzzles and opening up new areas of the hotel to lingering in a handful of rooms that I just couldn’t understand, pacing between them and searching my notes for hidden clues search. After about 45 minutes, I remembered that I still had a simple puzzle from my first lesson waiting to be solved; I returned to the game, completed it, and in response the game expanded beautifully, offering a whole new area of the hotel to explore and increasing the pace once again.
Every Eureka moment in Lorelei Raises more questions and the mysteries pile up as a grand, overarching narrative elegantly unfolds around the protagonist. There are classic horror elements here: children in owl masks giving advice from the afterlife, hellishly dark hallways, creepy phonograph music, ghosts without eyes. A man with a maze for a head, hovering right behind you and reaching for your neck. The game seamlessly introduces different visual styles at regular intervals, disrupting its own reality in a perfectly orchestrated way.
All of this craziness forms a cohesive experience because Simogo knows how to make a damn good puzzle game. This is the studio behind it Device 6an iOS title that played with text and physical input methods in strange ways, And Annual walka haunting adventure about Swedish mythology and death. Lorelei feels like a magnum opus for Simogo, an atmospheric powerhouse of a puzzle game that proves how deeply its developers understand these systems and pushes the genre into strange and unknown territory.
Lorelei and the laser eyes is a rat king of puzzles. It is a game composed entirely of mysteries, with each puzzle revolving around the previous one and strangling the next, with the solutions linked to hidden information. Mark my words, the game instructions for this thing are going to look like this House of Leaves.
I’m ten hours in and there are still a lot of mysteries left. In the west wing there is a six-hand clock with zodiac signs and Roman numerals that I still can’t decipher, and there is a diary with a lock based on moon phases that is slowly driving me crazy. More than a dozen puzzles are waiting to be solved in the notepad on my character’s screen. In real life, the pages of my notebook look similar, littered with hastily scribbled numbers, letters, dates, arrows and symbols, solutions scattered in the chaos.
Lorelei and the laser eyes is scheduled to release on Steam and Switch on May 16th.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/lorelei-and-the-laser-eyes-preview-this-may-be-my-goty-140030011.html?src=rss