review

By flotsam

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Simogo/Annapurna Interactive

Despite a dud segment and not yet getting to the end (it became a bit of a chore), this was overall a seriously good puzzling time across its impressive length.

You start in the woods, a stylish young woman with a clutch purse and sunglasses and a car close by. Rummage a bit and a letter indicates you have come to the Hotel Letzes Jahr at the behest of Signor Nero to help him “transcend the limitation of art for humans.” An instruction booklet hints at something connected, but first things first. A glimpsed sign through the trees suggests you need to go that way. And so it begins.

Lorelei is a puzzle box writ large, one constructed (largely) of monochromatic environments demanding to be explored and unpacked. The who and the what and the why are as puzzling as the myriad of conundrums that await. Patience and persistence will both be useful virtues.

As will a pen and paper. Whilst there is an excellent in-game repository of everything you have accessed (documents, notes, books, etc.) and every puzzle you have found that needs completing, I still found taking notes and making sketches incredibly helpful. As you progress, you will likely get an idiosyncratic sense of when a notation or a scribble might be useful.

The hotel is big and much of it is (almost) immediately accessible. Locked doors abound, but there is plenty enough to start with. Explore and poke, and trust that the answer can be discerned. Not immediately maybe (probably), but after some more exploring and poking.

And thinking.

Its (relative) non-linearity was a big positive, as was the fact that you don’t need to solve every single puzzle to get to the end. Many of the locked doors for instance provide a shortcut back to other parts of the hotel. Solve them or simply go the long way round. Ditto the puzzles that provide maps of the various floors.

That said, you still need to solve an awful lot of them (and do yourself a favour and solve the maps!).

Despite its somewhat austere aesthetic visually, I thought it was a treat. Check out the screenshots for a more accurate depiction than I could describe. The rich tapestry of the hotel contrasts with some lo-fi elsewhere moments in keeping with what is going on. Colour isn’t absent, but makes an impactful burst here and there, and also saturates certain sequences (the red maze stands out). Whatever was going on, I never found it boring.

There is no spoken word, but it didn’t matter. The ambient sounds and the use of music were more than enough and very ‘real.’ The old world noise of the computers was a particular favourite (you save by accessing terminals found throughout the hotel).

The story is elaborate, a touch meta and also bizarre, and you can discover it (and sort it out) for yourself. While the puzzles are the thing, I was rather more invested in what might be going on than in many puzzle-centric games.

You can put away your mouse as everything is done with the keyboard. WASD moves you around and things you can interact with will shine when you get close enough. Press enter and you might take, read or in some other way interact with whatever it is that is shining. Often it will activate a puzzle, and while operating within a puzzle can be a bit fiddly at first (the cut up posters stood out in that regard) you will reasonably quickly get the hang of it. If an inventory item is needed when activating a puzzle, you will automatically open your purse to enable you to select an item, which if you choose one will then automatically either work or it won’t.

Press enter at any other time and it will bring up an interface where you can view and interrogate all of the information you have gathered. More of that later, but the interface also has some other intriguing information, including your caffeine influence and the state of your bladder. You can find out more about those yourself, although the coffee machines and the bathrooms might give you an inkling.

Another piece of information is your economy, which is how many $ you have found and not yet spent. Amongst other things, you can spend them in a vending machine and display the resulting little figurine on a table nearby. Collect all 20 and… who knows? Like patting the dog (you can pat the dog), it seems to be for no other reason than fun.

You explore in the third-person, making your way from room to room, exits indicated by an arrow on the floor. The dominant perspective could be described as a three-quarter camera angle view, which gives a semi-3D look where both the top and side of objects are visible. However it can be all sorts of other things as you move through the rooms – down low, side on, top down, high and behind or in front, etc. My recollection is that it will always be the same in any particular room, but it brings a dynamism to your exploration.

At the same time, it works in conjunction with the WASD keys to produce a very natural feel to getting about. W moves Lorelei towards the top of the screen, A to the left and so on, and that doesn’t change whatever the camera perspective might be. While exiting to a room on the left might change your viewpoint from side on to top down, you will still be moving left and the room you exited will be to the right. To change your mind and go back just press D and Lorelei will pivot and go back that way. The virtually instantaneous transition between the rooms provides the realistic punctuation.

I probably should say though that there are some places you will go that work completely differently.

So what of the puzzles?

They are everywhere and are big and small. Some require solving several others first and drawing the connections between found information, while others simply require you to look up (but then solve) the appropriate puzzle in the particular book. Codes abound, but are discerned in many ways. Clues can literally be right there or some way away and are often presented or uncovered in interesting ways. Movie posters are an obvious case in point, found throughout the hotel and not to be ignored, and I particularly liked the way you generated the software bug reports.

It can be hard, and gets harder. Recognising and making associations will help. Some things are key and will recur in different ways but recurring nonetheless. There were times when I wondered ‘what the??’ but then noticed something that linked back to something earlier including its mechanics. Applying what I knew about how that earlier puzzle worked then made a significant difference to what to do at this puzzle. I thought that the game did a good job of feeding on itself, building subsequent puzzles on what had come before.

Repetition works in more mundane ways. For instance, once you work out how to unlock a shortcut door, the same mechanics apply to all the others. When I worked it out it made me want to run around finding and unlocking as many as possible.

The repository of things learned will also be your friend. Pull up the relevant interface and what is described as “photographic memory” is in fact a categorised collection of all the things you have looked at. Categories include, maps, books, documents, notes, letters, signs, patterns and inscriptions, visions, and messages from the past. So much stuff is here and it's incredibly thorough. Pay attention to underlining.

You also have “mental notes” which is a list of everything you have come across that needs doing (e.g., open the x door), “current possessions” (which is your inventory) and “personal history” which records when you did things (and which I never looked at). You will get a little on-screen notification when something is added, and new additions will be indicated.

There were certainly times when I had no idea what to do next, whether I should keep looking for more information or was just missing the point. I did therefore need to access a walkthrough (at the time of writing there is a rather good hint guide at Steam) and in doing so, I became aware that numerous puzzles randomise. The why of the puzzle will likely be the same but your own bits and pieces will be different, so there is still a degree of solving required.

I mentioned a maze and you will end up in one more than once (and yes, there is a minotaur). I tend to find mazes not much better than filler, but the ones here present in interesting ways and I rather enjoyed their challenge.

Having said that, the last maze experience did contribute somewhat to the feeling of being a chore. It was less about the maze itself but more about the fact that you could die in there. More than that, you can’t save in the maze (death means starting from your last save), so I felt it necessary to work my way back out in order to create a save point and not jeopardise the things I had found. Which meant I had to navigate the maze all over again to get back to where I was.

It sounds worse than it is. Without giving too much away, you don’t die randomly but as the result of not solving puzzles, and all the puzzles involve answering a game-related question correctly. The puzzles exist at junctions between the segments of the maze and solving one will permanently open that junction. You can factor that into making decisions about how often you might need to save.

While I went in and out two or three times, in the absence of the dud segment it might not have had the same impact. So what of that?

The particular segment came a little bit before (about ¾ of the way through the game) and involved men with little mazes for heads. If they catch you and you can’t solve their puzzle you die. Having been caught and died I did my best to avoid them but – spoiler alert – you need to be caught, because you need what they give you when you solve their puzzle. Which sounds OK once you work it out, but once they start to appear they spawn one at a time and (as far as I could tell) completely randomly. Nothing I could work out helped make them appear. I reckon I spent over an hour just walking about and waiting for my sunglasses to glitch (a sign I think that one was close) until all nine of them caught me and I solved their respective conundrum. Which was on top of the time I had spent running away.

Each of their conundrums is of the same type - in short, it involves inspecting a scene and then answering a question about it – and if you pay attention you should be fine. But get it wrong and die, you then wander around some more until you get to try again (assuming you saved).

The maze I described above doesn’t come immediately after, but having made my way through that and then utilised the things I had collected, I ran out of puff to do what was then required. I will go back to it, but having then looked at a walkthrough and seen what was coming, I confess I watched through to an end on YouTube (I understand there is more than one).

It was a sum of the parts sort of thing, and in the absence of the spawning men I might have been less worn down. But (and while I remain open to be told that there was an obvious way to make them appear quickly) that sequence was a misstep that coloured what came after. That probably says more about me than the game, and from what I saw the last few puzzle sequences are elaborate and intricate and warrant your brainy attention, but mine had had enough.

And yet, I remain a fan. So much was so puzzlingly good across the 25 hours or so that I played until I stopped. I play action games where I get to a point where the struggle causes me to put it aside, and yet I loved playing and have even played it up to that same point again. This was a bit like that. I will put some distance between me and it, and then come back in an effort to finish it off.

I played on:

OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz

RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB

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