Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is a third-person adventure game available on Steam developed by Simogo and published by Annapurna Interactive.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is included in our recommendation guide for Play at Home Puzzle Games. For more of the best online escape games in this style, check out the recommendation guide.
Format
Style of Play:
- Third-person adventure game
Who is it For?
- Story seekers
- Puzzle lovers
Required Equipment: Computer with internet connection, pen & paper
Taking notes (pen and paper) and/ or taking photos of your screen regularly is highly recommended.
A controller is not required but highly recommended as playing with a mouse and keyboard is awkward on PC (Switch, no problem).
Recommended Team Size: 1
Play Time: about 20 hours
Price: $24.99
Booking: purchase and play at your leisure
“Equally embodying escape room-esque exploration and discovery, puzzle hunt-esque layered ahas, and high-concept cinematic absurdism, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes demonstrated a bold new direction for puzzle video games.”
Description
We controlled a character who came to consciousness next to an abandoned car in the middle of the forest near a hotel. Our only goal was to find “the Truth.” It was always clear what we could interact with in order to learn information and collect objects to use throughout the experience. As we explored, our “photographic memory” kept track of essential discoveries, allowing us to refer to previous experiences while focusing our interactions on forward progress.
This is a third-person adventure game. It is not a point-and-click game; you must move the character around to interact with things.
Ryan Brady’s Reaction
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a padlock party of the highest order. If it were just the puzzles in a boring framework, this game would be merely solid. But developer Simogo has worked their signature magic, infusing the game’s environment and soundscape with a huge dose of style and elegance. The narrative is wonderfully paced. Watching what happened at the Hotel Letztes Jahr unfold, and learning who you are and what the hotel is was a joy. Every time I stopped for the day it was hard to resist just one more puzzle. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the best puzzle games in recent memory and one of the best video games so far this year. Period.
Matthew Stein’s Reaction
Hyperstylized, abundantly self-aware, and unrelentlessly meta, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was precisely the sort of surrealist, absurdist puzzle palace that I dream of inhabiting. A compelling noir aesthetic and a slew of enigmatic characters set the scene for some of the most brilliant puzzle design I’ve experienced in recent memory.
Impressively, the gameplay captured the feel of a puzzle hunt. That is, puzzles were varied, layered, and aha-driven, structured in clear thematic rounds which sometimes culminated in metapuzzles — all while taking advantage of the unique strengths of the video game medium. It was helpful, if not necessary, to have a notebook at hand while playing to track open threads and work through some of the more intricate solves. The game also provided a diegetic caching system for the documents and data you encounter, justified by your character having a “photographic memory.”
This structure produced a remarkable sense of adventure and discovery throughout the mostly open world. Physical gating (locked boxes, locked doors) and interactive maps helped to provide a steady sense of forward progress and prevent earlier stages of the game from becoming too overwhelming.
Even amongst my favorite puzzle video games, individual puzzles tend to blur together over time, particularly for games which are designed around level-based layering of variations on core mechanics. This was not the case with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes; weeks after playing, I can still vividly recall dozens of specific puzzle solves and world-scale revelations. The only real exception was a sequence of mildly annoying math-y riddles which lacked the compelling narrative context of nearly every other puzzle trail in the game.
If you love puzzles, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an absolute must-play.
Joel Smileypeacefun Reaction
As a young lady, you’re invited to stay at a special hotel set in Italy. It’s unclear to you why you’re here, supposedly to help with a new art installation. But can you find out the truth?
At its best, the interface and the way you interact with items felt pretty reminiscent of nostalgic adventure games. To help you navigate, there are multiple maps and shortcuts you could optionally unlock. The story itself is intriguing, for sure. Even if it’s hard to understand what, exactly, is going on, a quick internet search for “ending explained” afterward will definitely give you a nice aha and some closure.
At its worst, although there are a plethora of locked doors at any given time, the game only does a semi-decent job at lock mapping, lacks streamlined gating, and in some cases, it’s a stretch to which puzzle a clue belongs. It’s hard to get through without looking up walkthroughs on YouTube. I get that this overwhelming maze-type of gameplay is intentional, but when three-quarters of your time becomes just running around, it stops being fun. The puzzles themselves range in quality, some have nice and multilayered solves, while others are lame brainteasers you’d find in the back of a People magazine. In an attempt of some sort of meta-mechanic, it resulted in no automatic progress saving. You had to do that manually every so often. I’m not sure if the story justifies this enough to outweigh how annoying it was. Especially towards the end, sequences felt long just for the sake of dragging things out.
Most importantly, you need to know that with this game, you are getting yourself into something that easily takes 20+ hours to finish. Also, accept that you most likely won’t discover every little puzzle and story bit there is on a casual playthrough.
Sarah Mendez’s Reaction
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes perfected the coveted trifecta of narrative, puzzling, and style, interweaving each element with the others to create something bigger than its parts. The narrative, a compelling search for “the Truth,” unfolded in a dizzying array of snippets that felt overwhelming at times but slowly came into focus, continually shifting our perception of reality until the final moments of the game. This sprawling universe of information provided a vast canvas for multi-layered ahas and connections, yielding an extensive collection of high-quality puzzles. Indeed, these puzzles elegantly and symbiotically forced us to process the vast swaths of information we uncovered, always pushing the narrative back to center stage. Finally, the distinctive and varying aesthetic of the game emphasized different themes and thru-lines at different times, enhancing the other creative beats of the game with their own flavor. The end result was a visually, intellectually, and emotionally powerful experience that left me deep in thought after finishing and eager to revisit many of its details. It feels inadequate to call this simply a puzzling game. It was a work of art in itself, one that has lingered long after the credits ended.
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