Lorelei and the Laser Eyes unfolds like an origami star. The more you play Simogo’s logic puzzle game, the more unexpected complexity you find folded in it, flattened neatly into an unassuming, pretty exterior. You’ve arrived at an aristocratic hotel in Europe. Your handbag carries keys for your car that won’t start, and tampons. You’re missing all of the important answers, like where, when, or who you are, but the puzzle of your existence is at first only unsettling. Then it consumes you.
How could it not? Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a proud puzzle game. Everything in it is a supernatural puzzle, from discovering who brought you to the hotel to figuring out how to pour complimentary espresso. But the game most commonly relies on math puzzles which, to their credit, can often stand on their own outside the context of the game. So, while the “instruction manual” I unearthed from my protagonist’s glove compartment recommended I use a pencil and paper to complete Lorelei, I found it more satisfying to play the game like it was intended for text message co-op. It always helped to have a second opinion, especially since the game connects every challenge with an abstruse story about art transcending reality, with deadly consequences.
In this sense, Lorelei will be very familiar to fans of Layers of Fear and Game Grumps’ 2023 puzzle horror game Homebody. Lorelei shares notable structural and thematic similarity to the latter, especially, down to the inscrutable supercomputer hidden somewhere in the house. But, like Layers of Fear, Lorelei’s story treats art like it’s a horrible father – a bottomless pit of need looking for a building to burn down. These overblown stories tend to disappoint me, since I think art makes a more effective outlet than demon. In any case, like both of these games, Lorelei makes you understand that your primary functions are to walk around an artist’s mansion filled with freaky, reality-bending puzzles, and then click on them like you aren’t afraid of the space-time continuum.
LORELEI AND THE LASER EYES | Release Date Trailer
On my Switch review copy, the clicking part was occasionally frustrating – there were no back or cancel buttons, so if I inspected something like a suspicious clock or portrait, I was forced to attempt the puzzle it inevitably revealed itself to be. When I failed, the game immediately cut to a black loading screen instead of allowing me to seamlessly retry the puzzle the way Resident Evil 4 does, with its many comparable mismatched statues and runes. It made puzzle solving, at times, feel unnecessarily frustrating, and I found myself losing patience and interest in problems I was otherwise intellectually invested in.
Lorelei, to its credit, offers a range of puzzle types to break the tension. Aside from a rote cluster of trivia questions, which relied on the quickly overwhelming number of torn book pages and typewriter notes I started collecting, I’d always leave a solved puzzle feeling surprised satisfaction. Many of the game’s brain-teasers strike the ideal balance between challenging and obtainable – I felt respected by the game I was putting paranoid hours into. I had trained myself not to overlook beckoning piano keys or wine bottles, or any other hotel feature. There were answers in them, there were answers everywhere.
