Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game I was looking forward to a lot despite not knowing much about it. Sayonara Wild Hearts is one of my favourite games of all time, so another game by Simogo is going to excite me, even though I wasn’t super into Year Walk and this game is much closer to Year Walk than to SWH.

And damn, I was not disappointed. This game is really good. The puzzles are fun and varied, the atmosphere is peak, the music (and lack thereof) works well with everything else and figuring out the story is interesting. In fact, this game is so good I’m bringing back star ratings but only for 5 star games, because I feel kind of bad for not being able to put it on my top 5.

I remember reading a review for Inscryption on this site (can’t find it anymore, sorry) saying that video games about video games are getting tiring, but I think this is game is a really great example of interesting things you can do with that since it is not just about video games but about art as a whole and how video games fit in. As @Mrsambarlow pointed out in his review, one thesis of the game in that regard is that “There is actually a huge similarity between the puzzle-box mansion of a Resident Evil and an art installation”. Another very interesting thing I think the game proposes is that video games are unique among art because they do not require an audience (as long as the player is considered a co-artist to some degree).

Despite my overwhelming love for the game, I do have some minor nitpicks. The game is very nonlinear, some of the earliest solvable puzzles don’t become relevant until the very end for example, which is mostly pretty awesome but it can get a bit frustrating when you have a bunch of clues and a bunch of unsolved puzzles, but you don’t know which of these puzzles are actually solvable.
And why have one of your main characters grow up in Nazi Germany and then just not bring that up whatsoever outside of one line about “the city getting dangerous”? It’s something I’d rather see addressed more or just left out, make her Swiss or something instead. Also Simogo said on twitter that the one button + stick controls were partially inspired by the ability to play Sayonara Wild Hearts with only one hand and take notes with the other, so it’s very strange that you can’t actually do that here if you can’t write with your left hand (unless there’s some trick I couldn’t figure out).

Don’t wanna end on a minor nitpick negative so I will add that the game, despite its overall dark and mysterious atmosphere, has a very good type of humor sometimes, like with the bladder meter, or the use of American Dollars despite its German setting.

„Puzzle game“ is kind of a really weird genre, isn’t it?
I had that thought earlier this year when working on my [30 days 30 video game songs list]( https://www.backloggd.com/u/Rowan1312/list/30-video-game-songs-in-hopefully-around-30-days/). The prompt for the day was puzzle game music, so I went to my [played games and filtered by genre]( https://www.backloggd.com/u/Rowan1312/games/played/type:played;genre:puzzle/). That’s a lot of very different games! Including some that are absolutely not puzzle games. Broadly I would put them into three subgenres:
- Single-gimmick puzzle games (e.g. Baba is You, Portal)
- Strategy-puzzle games (e.g. Plants vs Zombies, Mini Motorways)
- Games that have another main genre that use puzzles to break up the gameplay loop sometimes (e.g. Resident Evil, OFF)
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is closest to the third, despite being a primarily puzzle game. Its style of puzzles varies greatly, and the only thing really holding it back from being obviously in that category is that you don’t have some enemies to shoot between puzzles. The game even references classics of the genre like Signalis Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Why am I spending so much time discussing genre, something I generally despise?
Because there is actually a fourth type of puzzle game I really enjoy, but it’s not something people generally consider as puzzle games. It’s the story puzzle. Games where you are only given fragments of the events and have to figure out what happened on your own. My primary example for this is the Souls series, games no one would ever call puzzle games except for me. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is another. This is also why I personally hate it when people rely too much on “lore youtubers” for the Souls series, it feels like you’re robbing yourself of a core part of the experience.
“Don’t you just mean mystery game?”, I hear you ask. Maybe, kinda? But I think there is a difference between a classic mystery game that are about what happened, and games where part of the experience is figuring out what happened/is happening but are primarily concerned with something else.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is particularly interesting in this regard because while you are never told the full story, its elements keep being used as puzzle pieces.

Okay I am noticing that this train of thought is getting away from me, this was originally supposed to be the opening to my review but I think I’ll just publish it as its own separate thing, not quite aimless enough to be deleted.