Do you like puzzle games? Do you enjoy the thrill of figuring out solutions to night-impossible riddles? Are you also impatient? And maybe kind of stupid? Then do what I did and please play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes with your spouse.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an escape room styled puzzle game. It drops the titular character, whose name I still haven’t figured out even though I finished the damn thing, in an old abandoned hotel riddled with puzzles. Finish the puzzles and you can escape the mansion. And maybe along the way figure out what the eff is going on.
Lorelei is a very cryptic game. It just drops you in it with very little explanation. Sure, the first puzzles may be basic math problems, but quickly you’ll be littered with puzzles that all seem interconnected: The solution to one may be part of the solution of another – and vice versa. Many hours will just be spent walking around the massive maze of a hotel (mazes being, as the trailer already suggests, a recurring theme) cursing at the random cryptic bull this game throws at you. Horse heads! Coffee machines! Video game consoles! They’re all there.
I’m gonna be frank: I want to like puzzle games. But I never have the patience to play them by myself. I want things to move forward. I don’t want to spend time jotting down notes and thinking. I wanna press buttons, damnit! Thankfully, my partner loves thinking and hates pressing buttons, so over the course of two weeks, we let this puppy consume us. We filled over twenty pages with notes comparing symbols, juggling numbers (mainly 1847, 1963 and 2014), figuring out two versions of the same maze – and we had a blast doing so. The reason is simple: Lorelei is a masterpiece. The graphic design is a master class, the hotel looks amazing, and there’s some beautiful graphical twists going on, too. Its puzzles are well-built and the structure very thoroughly considered. Sure, you can wander aimlessly around the house, pondering 20 puzzles at the same time, but that also means you can never truly get stuck. In a way, this game reminded us of the most excellent Return of the Obra Din. And like Obra Din, this game has an intriguing narrative that keeps you guessing until the very end.
So yeah, play Lorelei. Unless you’re single. In that case, you’ve got other problems, son.