Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Reviews

One of the most thoughtful and creative puzzle games I've ever played. Provides continuous "Aha!" moments to unique and innovative riddles. Also does a great job of providing multiple simultaneous puzzles to solve, so that you're rarely gated behind any single challenge. Definitely worth playing if you enjoy slow, thoughtful puzzle games.

One of those games where you'll forever wish you could play it for the first time again. The puzzles are perfectly tuned to provide a challenge without ever feeling unfair. The mood is pitch-perfect; haunting and intriguing in equal measure. The story is masterfully paced, keeping you hooked trying to solve the puzzle of what is truly going on in this enigmatic place.

A puzzle game full of various riddles, set in a resident evil esque mansion/hotel. The puzzles are mostly very well crafted. they are challenging enough to be interesting but not so hard that I kept getting stuck. I was able to reach 100% without consulting a guide, although I did partially brute force one puzzle. It took me 19 hours to finish the game, although I did not get all the achievements in that time. You don't need to be obsessive about note taking since the game records everything for you automatically, but I highly recommend using pen/paper or screenshots for certain puzzles since you can't reference the in game notes while interacting with puzzles. I was a little disappointed by the ending narratively, but the puzzles and progression were very well done. I never felt stuck on a single puzzle during the entire game, as there were always at least 2 or 3 puzzles to work on at any given time. Overall this is well worth a playthrough for anyone looking for a resident evil style puzzle box without the survival horror aspects

great on a game mechanic, artistic and story level.

Great soundtrack and satisfying story. Best with a friend as most puzzle games are. This game is full of many tiny puzzles, making for a very addictive game loop where you feel like you are just blasting through it. However the whole time, you'll be coming back to puzzles you had thought were unsolvable, only to instantly see the solution when you return. The world design is extremely well done. It's very expansive and non-linear; in my experience, you can miss/ignore important puzzles and very large sections of the map and still make a huge amount of progress through the game before you finally get stuck.

This game is awesome, though not without its flaws. My wife and I picked it up on a weekend and couldn’t stop obsessing over it for two weeks—it was a fantastic adventure. However, I have a feeling that playing it solo might become tedious after a while, especially given the ~32-hour playthrough. The story is engaging, and the puzzles are interesting, usually following a well-defined, interconnected structure. As you progress, you become more familiar with the game, making it more enjoyable. The puzzles themselves are fun to solve. However, some puzzle designs are, in my opinion, frustrating. There were many times when we knew the answer but couldn’t input it correctly due to the setting, often requiring numerous attempts since there were multiple ways to input the right solution. The game leaves much of its story for the player to figure out, which I personally love. However, I feel the game lacks major “reveal” moments. The pieces only truly start falling into place toward the end, making it feel more like a puzzle game than a murder-mystery. At times, this shift in tone made the experience feel a bit monotonous and less exciting than it could’ve been. I know the developers aimed for a PS1/PS2-era style and feel, but I think they may have taken it too far. Initially, it's charming, but as you continue, the navigation and controls start to feel cumbersome. What felt nostalgic at first quickly became a bit frustrating as everything you engage with feels harder to navigate than necessary. The game could’ve been more open: It feels almost impossible to finish without at least a 90% discovery rate, meaning very little of the game feels optional. While this creates a sense of interconnectedness as you go back and forth between puzzles, it can also feel restrictive and limit your freedom quite a bit. In conclusion: If you love puzzles and have the time to invest, I highly recommend picking it up, especially if you can share the experience with someone. However, if you're on the fence after reading some reviews, the game may not be for you. Unfortunately, the 2-hour “window test” isn’t enough to determine if this game will click with you.

I'll start by saying that I enjoyed this game. After playing the entire HL series, I needed a break from the FPS genre and a puzzle game like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was the perfect change of pace. It felt good to scrutinize every letter, note, magazine, etc. for clues while keeping scattered notes of all the remaining loose strands. The puzzles were solid overall, however I was a bit disappointed at times as it felt like you either already had the information needed to complete a puzzle or you were missing a crucial piece of information and a puzzle would be impossible without it. To compare Lorelei to my favorite game in this genre, Return of the Obra Dinn, it felt like there was less freedom in how the puzzles were solved. Whereas in Obra Dinn, you could theoretically get to solutions quicker with outside knowledge of sailing, cultures, etc. or via finding the clues in the game. But that doesn't appear to be the case in Lorelei, which I was initially very excited about. Overall, the story and art/presentation was very good and, while most of the puzzles were solid, there were also times where I was wondering through the house looking for the one letter that I missed that had the answer written on it

This game has good puzzles and exploring the mansion is fun. I'd recommend this game to some people, but it has some flaws that prevent me from recommending it in general. I was stuck at around 40% completion due to [spoiler]an upside down lamp on the second floor[/spoiler] which forced me to use a guide. The 2 [spoiler]maze[/spoiler] sections of the game are contrived and annoying. I don't mind backtracking in the Hotel, or revisiting the [spoiler]forest video game[/spoiler], but I draw the line at the punishing need for memorization due to threat of small mistakes. I think the game would be better if you could access what I assume is faster movement earlier on, but I understand the need to have walking pace movement to avoid players running past clues since the Hotel itself is both puzzle and setting. I guess it is a pet peeve of mine that I get annoyed at slow movement when barely less than appropriate. Relating to the clue collection system (aka memory) in this game, and the backpack [b]tm[/b], I think having additional button utility while on pc or using a controller would be nice. I don't see why back buttons or a bookmark wouldn't be included, I don't want to have to take a photo or write down every detail even if that is the intended experience, because stupid monkey brain that I have would rather just jump back and forth between while trying to memorize details. Game is best when the flow into and between puzzles is smooth. Game is worst when I've solved a puzzle but need to toil at the finer details in the memory. This problem doesn't happen often at all, but I lost my patience in [spoiler] the 2nd maze [/spoiler]. Game is good overall, but I dislike having my patience tested.

Video games have gotten so good at drawing players into their worlds, from their presentation in the form of lifelike graphical fidelity, sharp art direction, and naturalistic voice-acted dialogue that together weave a spellbinding story to “core gameplay loops” that put us in a satisfying flow state wherein we lose track of time stuck repeating those loops as if they were second nature, and in their most cynical form, with dark patterns of UI and UX and FOMO that farm us for engagement to maximize the chances of us spending even more money on ~content~. Puzzle games make up the one genre that always snaps me out of this fantasy so that I can recognize myself as separate from what I am playing. They are constantly forcing me to reckon with the design and see the game as a game meticulously constructed by other people. Other genres certainly do the same, as it’s inherent to the medium to ask its audience for active and immediate participation, to acknowledge its rules when they try to play. Puzzle games just make it so it happens with every single point of interaction, relentless in their reminders of their artifice, the designers always stopping you with each puzzle to do the seemingly impossible and demand you read their minds through layers of deliberate obfuscation. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes renders this artifice with the clarity of a transparent rhinestone, refracted through logic puzzles, perspective puzzles, math problems, cryptograms, mazes, quizzes, and riddles that you solve within text parsers, point-and-click adventures, and 32-bit 3D horror games within a virtual reverse escape room that evokes Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion, but instead of the living dead, Pepper’s ghost haunts the halls of Hotel Letzes Jahr. Behind this padlock that halts progress, a keypad with a code; type the right code in the keypad, a jigsaw awaits; put the pieces together, you get a mystery box to crack open. With every puzzle solved, the reward is yet another confounding puzzle, refusing to let the player ever get comfortable. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a ceaseless snapping of the fingers to wake the audience, producing an inescapable [i]verfremdungseffekt[/i] that empowers them to pierce through the parlor tricks of solipsistic, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing pretension. It is a video game that warns the player to never give in to astonishment, and for that, it earns my applause.

A fantastic and well-crafted puzzle game with a similarly well-crafted plot. No substantive critiques in any form; the game's difficulty is well-balanced, it doesn't outstay its welcome but more than provides a worthwhile time. Now I've just gotta decode these strange sequences from the ending...