Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of those games you shouldn’t read too much about before playing it. By design, it’s packed to the rafters with layers upon layers of puzzles, and discussing this web of head-scratchers — or even its story — would be to undo a little bit of its magic.
Initially, all you know is that you’ve arrived by invitation to a practically empty hotel in the middle of nowhere, and it’s your job to explore every inch of the building and solve its many puzzles. After a brief tutorial on how the game operates, you’re free to wander the grounds, gradually opening up the hotel as you progress. The non-linear design means you have at least a couple of puzzles to attend to at any given moment, and it feels fantastic to slowly untangle the hotel’s mess of locked doors and strange secrets.
It’s an extremely dense game with almost every part of the environment a puzzle, or a clue with which to solve one. The sheer number of puzzles is impressive, but perhaps more so is the variety of ways it tests you. While many of the challenges involve unlocking doors, you’ll do so by applying knowledge taken from a huge number of in-game documents and visuals.
In fact, the amount of stuff you’re meant to absorb here is quite intimidating; had we not used a notebook to do some working out or keep track of things, we may not have gotten through the game. This might sound off-puttingly dense, and it certainly won’t be for everyone, but we found peeling back the layers of the hotel (and the story) to be incredibly compelling, especially when one solution would snowball and lead us to several others.
The visual style is super striking, and alongside the sparse soundscape, it creates an eerie atmosphere as you poke around the hotel and beyond. The presentation works well, and changes in certain sequences; while the gameplay in these might be a bit weaker, the art remains a strength throughout.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an intricate ball of puzzles that’s very pleasing to untangle. If you love a brain teaser and being challenged to think in new ways, there are few other games that’ll scratch that itch quite like this one.