Author: Bert

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.

If you’re following games media even the tiniest bit, you will undoubtedly be aware of the insane amount of lay-offs that have been happening. After what seems like the most lucractive year in terms of releases, studios that have been acquired by giants like the embracer group or Microsoft have been dropping left and right. It shows how horrible the video game industry is to work in – no one, no matter how succesful you are, is safe. Case in point: Arkane Austin. Aside from an unfortunate dud last year, they’re one of my favourite studios and they created one of my favourite games: Prey.

(If you’re now googling Prey, please add 2017 to your search, as there is another Prey from 2006 which has nothing to do with this one. The atrocious name for this game is a wholly different and incredibly stupid story which, in my opinion, probably tanked game sales when the game launched.)

On the outside and on screenshots, Prey is a shooter set aboard a space ship. On the inside, however, Prey is an immersive sim. Yes, you shoot enemies, but this game is not really a shooter, but a role playing game. You are Morgan Yu, a crewmember of the Thalos 1, which has been overrun by aliens called Typhon. These aliens can turn into any object they see – so any harmless coffee mug can be a deadly creature. This already makes every second of the game tense, but it’s not why this game became my favourite of all time. The reason for that is the Thalos 1.

I’m not a huge fan of space ships or science-fiction, to be quite honest, but this game could be set in an english forest in the 1500s and I’d still be hooked. The reason for that is that Thalos 1 is a living, breathing, immersive world. There were 286 crew members aboard the space ship when the aliens took over, and each of these crew members have a name, a job description and a story to tell through various e-mails and voice messages. You can find all members in and around the gargantuan space station, most of them strewn across the hallways, half eaten, but some of them are quite cleverly hidden. Like actual people, the crew members of the Thalos 1 tried their very best to hide to survive.

And the realism doesn’t stop there. Every fridge, every cupboard, every nook and cranny is stuffed with items that actually belong there. Kitchens feel like kitchens, lounges like lounges and creepy labs… well, you get the gist. Moreover, the Thalos 1 has a logical lay-out, with the engines down at the bottom and the living spaces up top. At first, the game leads you by the hand from one level to the next, but it doesn’t take long until you actually run around the space ship like it was an actual place. There’s two kind of games: Games in which lobbies have toilets, and games in which they don’t. Prey has toilets. And you can fucking flush’em.

So it’s such a shame that Arkane Austin got the short end of the Microsoft stick. There were some incredibly talented people there, people who also have a firm hand on the wonderful Dishonoured and Deadloop franchises. I hope this is not a loss, and these people know what great things they can accomplish and find a way to create another game like this. Because I’ve yet to find one.

Just a public service reminder: It’s been ten years since Transistor came out. I remember being so impressed by Supergiant Games’ debut title, Bastion, that I franctically googled everything I could about Transistor. Hell, I even wrote a blog post about it. In the end, I remember being very whelmed, not because the game about a singer battling an enemy known as the Process, fell short of my expectations – I mean it did, but that’s not the game’s fault. My expectations were just insane.

Because, after all, this game was going to be, as the Germans call it, the egg-laying wool milk sow, i.e. the perfect game that could do anything. In the end, it was just a game. A very good, well-written, expertly designed both graphically and gameplay-wise, game – but still a game nonetheless. My imagination was just bigger, I guess.

Which is why it kind of makes me sad that in 2024, Supergiant Games is deciding to revisit another one of their amazing game worlds by making a sequel to the critically acclaimed roguelike Hades. Hades – a game that takes place in the Greek underworld and features gods, demigods and everything in between – was by all means an incredible game, one I put way more hours into than I put into Transistor, but the characters and the world never spoke to me the way Transistor did. Transistor was its own setting: A art deco cyberpunky world on the brink of destruction – Hades puts an interesting twist on Greek mythology, but as soon as I shut the game down, the world ceases to exist for me. Transistor is transcendal.

Anyway, why am I rambling? Because you should play Transistor. You can get it on PC. You can get it on your tablet. You can get it on your console. You can get it on your mac. You can get it on your phone. Any maybe there’s an art-deco smart fridge out there that runs this thing. It’s a short but sweet experience, about ten hours or so – and it’s a touching little experience. I just wish 2014 me realized that.