Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

I originally made this tumblr because I wanted to talk about both manga and games but ended up mostly only talking about games… I read a lot of manga I swear! (just a lot of them are ongoing, maybe when I do some rereads)

But recently I just finished Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I had a really good time with it! I was recommended it because I told a friend of mine I liked Obra Dinn and the Golden Idol games (Obra Dinn being one of my favourite games! Case of the Golden Idol is also excellent, the sequel is good too but not as good as the original). I came in expecting a similar sort of game with deduction and mystery though I realized quite quickly that the game wasn’t exactly like the other two lol.

I will also likely talk about spoilers so don’t read if you haven’t finished!

The main thing that stood out for me was the atmosphere of the game was really well done, the mostly grey-scale colour scheme and fixed camera angles along with a pretty spooky mansion did a great job of getting me in the mood for the story the game wanted to tell me. I’ll admit that I scare very easily so there were things that did scare me, though the game overall is not very scary. The sound design and the feel of the entire hotel was fantastic!

The puzzles were for the most part good, but I think my biggest problem with them is that a lot of them felt more like brainteasers/riddles, which aren’t bad puzzles but I definitely had a different expectation coming in. I thought they would be more deduction based, similar to Obra Dinn and the Golden Idol games, so having to do math and a bunch of other various riddles surprised me. Some good, some I thought were either a little uninspired (which in some cases like the shortcut doors, fair enough) or a bit frustrating for inputs, which is a good segue into my other problem with the game.

I think my biggest gripe is that the controls while simple were a litttttle frustrating at times. The biggest one being that there was no cancel/back button, intuitively I usually hit a cancel button to get out of a menu but sometimes that would just put me further into a menu! This was also a problem with some puzzles where sometimes I wanted to reset, but to do that, I had to mash out a wrong solution before being able to retry the puzzle.

But with those gripes out of the way, what I really, really, really loved about the game was the way it told its story. I’ve always been a fan of these kinds of story telling methods where you essentially drip feed information to the player, even seemingly unconnected drips, but at the end they pool together to form a cohesive story.

I think this was a really powerful way to tell the story of Lorelei coming to terms with her guilt about the events of 1963, and the reappearing years helped me as a player make those connections. Seeing the years 1847, 1963, and 2014 come into play so often I think was a good way at not only providing almost clues/hints with puzzles, but as a way to help the player understand the story the game is trying to tell.

Funnily enough with Renzo’s art piece being about interactive media, I thought it quite fitting that this game was a really good example of a story being told through interactive media. Taking control of Lorelei as she navigates her past in this way where there’s so many different branches that you as the player have to connect help make it more impactful when you get to the end.

Overall though I had a great time with the game (even finishing it all in one weekend)!