Review: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, far and away my most anticipated game release in some years, is the latest game from idiosyncratic indie studio Simogo. As a huge fan of their games, I was excited to sink my teeth into the game and went in completely blind, with no idea of what kind of game I was getting myself into. Even with my expectations as high as they are for a Simogo game, I was shocked at how much I ended up loving it. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a third-person puzzle game, where protagonist Lorelei Weiss slowly unravels the mysteries of her own life in a middle-of-the-previous-century hotel filled with locked doors and dozens and dozens of logic puzzles. The entire game is presented in a very evocative monochrome visual style with striking instances of bright maroon, but the puzzles aren’t just of the traditional videogame variety. From the beginning the player works to unlock Lorelei’s personal history and recover her memories, trying to make some kind of sense of her twisted chronology and sift through the details of Lorelei’s life and art. I will have a section at the end where I address spoilers but will try and keep major ones out of the body of the review.

I’ve been obsessed with Simogo since I played their short horror title Year Walk, one of those exceedingly rare formative moments you can have past childhood where a work just speaks to you on a level you weren’t previously aware you had been waiting for. But Simogo defies game genre labels, and clearly chases their muse wherever it takes them, always with their signature eclectic sensibilities. It is that uniqueness that ties their games together more than mechanics, aesthetics, characters or even themes, matched by a certain unmistakable Scandinavian-ness (from the same country that brought us such wonders as Jens Lekman and the princess cake). Sayonara Wild Hearts, their previous game in 2019, was a brightly colored aesthetic and systems showcase in direct contrast to Lorelei’s aesthetic and systems, but they’ve dabbled in genres as diverse as text adventures and tablet puzzle games. 

Lorelei represents Simogo’s most ambitious work to date, with millions of lines of in-game text and dozens of puzzles, many of which are randomized each time you play. Primarily you control Lorelei herself in third person as you explore the locked-off enigmatic hotel in which her mysterious companion has asked to meet her in West Germany, 1963, with most of the puzzles being physical objects you interact with. My first few hours walking around the hotel managed to nearly overload my brain with information, as I tried to commit every detail to memory (even though it’s all stored permanently in your inventory). As you walk around the hotel, there is a wonderful feeling in the controls that your actions are purposeful, that you must commit to certain actions in addition to looking through the menu. I will admit the menu controls never quite clicked with me; they always felt a little alien and unintuitive, but I think I just have RTS muscle memory built up and certain expectations for in-game UI and how you look through menus. And, a failed puzzle attempt will trigger a couple of seconds of unskippable cutscene, discouraging brute-force attempts to answer, even if you did have the patience to sit down and try every single different combination of three, four, six, or even 12 characters. 

The puzzles in Lorelei are phenomenal in a way it’s harder and harder to find in an era where most games have had all their rough edges smoothed over. Often they’re extremely tricky, but always, always, always fair: you will almost always have the information you need to solve them when you encounter them, and the solutions are fair without exception. It does, however, require and even expect that you play with a notepad to take some important notes to help you through the game, and maybe a calculator as many of the puzzles rely on math to solve. But as a person who struggles with math I was actually able to do all of the math puzzles relatively easily. In fact if you’re struggling with a puzzle in Lorelei and you have to spend more than five minutes doing math to solve it, if you’re breaking out the scientific calculator for binomial equations, you’ve definitely missed the mark and need to re-think how you’re approaching it. Conversely, I am very familiar with certain middle-class shibboleths like reading an analog clock and roman numerals, which may make the game more difficult if you need to refer to the in-game texts for these. There really is nothing like the “Aha!” moment of finally seeing the solution, or being able to mentally see the link between two places in the map, or walking into a new room and realising it’s the solution to something elsewhere. The game will not give you hints, even going so far as to have a help telephone line with one of the characters that rewards only with mangled spoonerisms and nonsense. 

Visually, Lorelei is a masterpiece, with a memorable contrast of black-and-white against against stark, bright maroon. The Hotel has that elusive feeling of a real place turned into an interactive medium, its rooms and levels menacing and unfamiliar to me even right at the end of the game. I did find it frustratingly hard to navigate more than once, and the lack of visual contrast in the black-and-white can be annoying to find your way around in, but it is (I believe) intentional, one more part of the game that resists your attempts to master it and come away with a clear answer. It is, if not a horror game in the traditional sense, certainly a disheartening one as you piece together the mystery of Lorelei’s life and have increasingly unnerving supernatural encounters. You never quite see anyone’s face clearly, not even Renzo, the enigmatic Italian visual artist who appears now and then to say peculiar things and generally just act suspicious (and more than a little threatening). At certain points the visual style inverts completely, with retina-piercing maroon occasionally invaded by black and white, as or perhaps more discombobulating than its inverse. 

I’ve consciously avoided talking about the story as much as is practicable, and after this point I’m going to dive into some more profound spoilers. But by way of ending, I’ll say that if you have any love in your heart for video game puzzles, or you just want to see someone really, truly utilise an interactive medium to make a labor of love, you owe it to yourself to play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. And I’d also recommend Simogo’s entire body of work, it’s all fantastic (even if I am historically terrible at SPLT). Highly recommended.

SPOILERS AND NARRATIVE ANALYSIS SECTION

As the game begins, it presents as its main narrative that Lorelei must learn about her own history through the clues left in the hotel, egged on by the enigmatic Renzo. Lorelei, we’re told, is an early but relatively unknown visual artist, born in the waning days of Nazi Germany and making her art throughout the latter half of the 20th century. In-game text describes her as making the first known versions of what would become to be known as digital art, working with the early elephantine computers and making vector art. The character Renzo, having seemingly invited Lorelei to the hotel to learn her own history via solving riddles, is an Italian visual artist busy rejecting the then-popular neorealism and making bizarre experimental films, the two having connected by chance when Lorelei wrote to Renzo to compliment his work, then collaborated. This early mystery slowly stretches out to sprawl across time, space, art, science, and presents as another of the game’s puzzles, challenging the player to piece together an interpretation of the events as presented throughout the game. Eventually we piece together that Lorelei shot Renzo in 1963 at the Hotel, and the hotel filled with puzzles with a supercomputer in the basement was part of their mutual art pieces Lorelei does not seem entirely consenting to. In fact, as much as the two have in common as people — both boundary-pushing visual artists with mixed critical reception from Axis powers newly emerging from occupation and reconstruction — as artists, the two seem diametrically opposed (a fact which seems to have encouraged Renzo’s instability). Renzo is obsessed with repetition and iteration, finding patterns or projecting patterns onto things: Lorelei is enamored by the new, pushing new creative frontiers and looking at things from different angles. 

In talking about a game which so strongly invites the player to interpret it, I think it would be remiss of me to not do so even if I think “decoding” a work to provide a definitive A-actually-means-B interpretation often diminishes it. I do think there is probably a True version of the story in the game’s bible, or even in the minds of the creators, but there’s a reason why its narrative is told in the way that it is with precious few definitive answers. A lot of interpretations of the story focus, understandably, on being able to separate the hard facts of Lorelei’s life from the many fictive or questionable elements mixed in, and bending it to the metaphor of an aged Lorelei trying to reckon with her memories and feelings despite her dementia. The characters Renate and Lorenzo exist in 1847, but are revealed to be constructs of Renzo’s imagination and his struggles to make art for art’s sake. However, to me the dividing line between what the game presents as “real”, such as the police investigation and 2014 Lorelei’s illness and hospitalisation, is as suspect as anything else in the game. 

It comes up repeatedly in the game that both Lorelei and Renzo struggle for their art against the necessity of procuring food and shelter using money. Lorelei compares going hungry as a child in wartime to her life as an artist, and Renzo, having lost American funding for his films, wants to create a new kind of cinema not meant to be shown to an audience but existing for its own sake, Cinema Sostenuto. And as you learn things about Lorelei’s life, the game in its setting, aesthetic choices and writing, the game does convey a very evocative sense of that passage of time: the gleaming post-war optimism slowly curdling into disaffected alienation as it turns out that in fact, basing your entire society on consumerism is a bad idea, actually. Lorelei in the 1970s and 1980s, post the incident with Renzo, flirts with doomsday cult nonsense that flits throughout both the parts of the narrative presented as “real” and the parts presented as “fiction”, culminating in an ill-fated trip to Indonesia. Both Lorelei and Renzo see advances in technology, cinema and computers, not as a means of making money but as a form of expression where they can express themselves in a form nobody has done. The idea of struggling to make art under capitalism was more poignant to me than attempting to definitively put the separate parts of the story into “real” and “fake”, and the games disinterest in even stating what, if anything, “laser eyes” are is admirable, and ties into Lorelei and Renzo’s approaches to art. If “Laser Eyes” means anything, it’s those rose tinted glasses, the precarious unreliability of memory (ours or other peoples) and ideas. The final line in the game is Renzo’s, who states that of course Laser Eyes don’t exist, and the empty promise of them throughout the game echoes techno-futurist Lorelei’s disappointment in the realities of life in the 21st century.

There’s a number of wonderful anachronisms in the story, a number of which trace the rough history of the interactive medium, from 1980s microcomputer maze runners starring Lorelei to a 1990s early 3D game where low poly Lorelei has Resident Evil movement controls. You can see the world catch up to Lorelei’s vision of interactive art that engages with its audience, but not as the focus of the world’s prestigious art galleries: as a consumerist product. And more than anything, the feeling of time washing over you, of looking back on the past regretfully, of how much can change in a short time or one tragic night in 1963, to try and see it all through rose tinted glasses is what the game is about. This is something of a digression but I went to a very highly lauded art exhibition recently called “time・rone” which tried to have some of the same themes as Lorelei but one which I truly, truly despised. It was bespoke recreations of scenes of 1950s life with a mournful woman painted into it, and whilst impressive on a technical level, didn’t really rise above the empty nostalgia for White Australia the mostly silver-haired crowds were taking it as. The artist’s intention, to make you existentially unhappy at the passage of time, was asinine and juvenile, and his thesis statement that we have “forgotten” the 1950s couldn’t be further from the truth as it is perhaps the most mythologized and revisited historical period of my lifetime with the probable exception the 1980s (also I am constantly experiencing ennui as to the passage of time, especially as a history buff). Lorelei, on the other hand, is deeply, deeply engaged with the failures of our parents and grandparents generations, meaningfully existential about how quickly time passes and how short human lives are, obsessed with the idea of creation, with how different people try to imbue their art with meaning. 

And although I don’t think it is (entirely) intentional, it’s hard not to read the game’s themes of trying to make art under capitalism in light of the very public implosion of their publisher, Annapurna Interactive. It’s well documented elsewhere but suffice to say, Annapurna was torn apart as part of an entirely preventable power struggle between feckless rich people over their mutual but conflicting desire to control others’ labour. And although it’s far from the only thing that Lorelei is about, I think it is the one that I think is key to being able to understand the narrative. It’s an intensely relatable one because, aside from a very small part of our society, we’ve all needed to prioritise obtaining food and shelter over the act of making art. We don’t make a secret of the fact that everyone at Ani-Gamers works full time, and we work on the site in our precious free hours in between laundry, grocery shopping, seeing our friends and everything else you have to do day-to-day. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game of and about that, and I loved every second I spent with it.