2026-01-31

#media #playing

Game: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

(This post does not contain story spoilers. Mostly because I don't fucking know what's going on either.)

I finished Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It was a great game! In 11 hours and 12 minutes, I reached 95.9% completion and earned 64 dollars. Suffice to say I still don't really have a good idea of what was going on.

I only found this game because of a video titled something like "Lorelei Is Just Like Blue Prince But Better!" And after playing, I agree with the video. So do expect constant comparisons to Blue Prince in this post.

Basically, the point of the video was to say Lorelei features a bunch of puzzles too, but unlike Blue Prince, it puts the randomization in the right places. The puzzle solutions are randomized, so if you want to consult a guide, which I relied on, no one can tell you what exactly the solution is, only how to solve it. The hotel rooms themselves are not. In Blue Prince, the rooms are randomly drawn, but the solutions are the same. So you could potentially know exactly what to do, but just fail to do it because you ran out of keys or steps.

My biggest gripe with this game is its controls. You only need a "walking around" key set (WASD or arrows) and an "interact" key (space or enter), making it possible to play this game with only one hand. However, that also made entering puzzles extremely clunky. When spinning locks, which is what you're doing half the time, if you miss the right number or letter, you have to spin it all the way around again. In addition, you can't quit; you have to input the combination and get it wrong, like a humiliation ritual. With all these keys on a keyboard this just felt like a crime. Many of the puzzle boxes and the inventory too; those would've been way better if I could click them with my mouse. They could've made it so much easier with more buttons, and only at the expense of unleashing upon the players the horror of playing with two hands.

And for a thing that I don't like as much but definitely works well in the game was the perspective. Because despite being 3D, most of the game is essentially in a top-down style where the direction keys control which direction you walk in. But since it's 3D, there's gotta be a perspective. Every room has a fixed perspective that you see the player character in. Sometimes it's kind of normal; sometimes it's completely top-down so you only see the player character's head; sometimes it's from a low spot so the character gets really big if you make her walk south. And well, at first it disoriented me a ton, but after I traversed these rooms enough I got used to it. And this works really well to limit your view of the rooms to whatever you need to see, and create a pretty unique type of 3D. Now, I don't play enough games to know if anyone else did this, but all the 3D games I could recall (Minecraft, Portal, Blue Prince, and nearly every Roblox game) were the "look in the direction of mouse" types.

In some parts of the game where that isn't the case, the north and south buttons make the character walk forwards and backwards, and the east and west buttons make her turn around on the spot. I could never manage to get her to walk properly. Still, why not just let me use a mouse? I get that some consoles may have constraints but can't you switch things up in the PC build?

Gripes aside, this was a great game. It actually has an in-game memory system that logs all the notes and stuff you've seen, as opposed to Blue Prince where they just expect you to screenshot everything. This helped tons, but especially when the part comes when it does not save the info in your memory — like pulling out the carpet under your feet suddenly. But well, you can just pull out the good old pen and paper.

But for a point in Blue Prince, it had those little tutorial notes in some of the most common rooms, and one big puzzle involved you re-examining these notes in a new light and finding out hidden clues inside them that you definitely would not have noticed when you first read them. By the time you do that, you would have walked past them dozens of times, having gotten so used to them you stop picking them up and don't think twice about them. I don't recall having similar things in Lorelei, since most puzzles are just… doors, that stay open once you open them; and most rooms are done for once you solve the puzzle inside it.

And yeah, most of this game is opening doors. When you've opened all the doors and visited all the rooms, you're close to the end of the game. Every puzzle you solve contribute to solving the ultimate puzzle — three codes required to log in to a supercomputer.

I still didn't really know what's going on in here. I read some interpretations on Steam which gave me an idea of what happened, but it still does not explain what our player character is doing here, how was she able to exist with the old woman at the same time, who was the guy on the other side of the phone… Maybe it was all a game Lorelei made for herself to reconcile with her past? No clue. Maybe I just wasn't smart enough. In Blue Prince, everything had a specific reason for being there — someone left the puzzle there for Simon to solve, mostly his great-uncle, his mom, Lady Auravei, and occasionally really really old royalty. But for Lorelei, it seems that the puzzles are just there, for the sake of being puzzles. I think the best explanation is that this game itself was made by Lorelei, who put these puzzles into this game, for us, the audience, to solve. If you look at Lorelei's art exhibits, all of them require audience participation, which was the direct opposite of Renzo, who always wanted to create art that does not require an audience.

<==

Home

==>