“In one of Nero’s many manifests,” reads a books in surreal puzzle-box Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, referring to its eccentric (read: tastefully deranged) antag-artist, “there is a satirical proposal claiming that only dictators should be allowed to direct films.” Developers Simogo - of well-deserved Sayonara Wild Hearts and Device 6 acclaim - seem to agree that’s a position worth satirising. Lorelei, despite its single-solution puzzles, is not dictatorial. It’s far too interested in collaborating with you for that. It wants you to observe, consider, and interpret its many mysteries. What’s really hooked me here is how those puzzles are kept coherent and logical, despite you getting delivered a letter by dog and occasionally visiting a floppy disk bizzaro world where you converse with a magician who manifests from his own discarded hat.

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Picking up Lorelei and the Laser Eyes feels like taking a step into a cryptic past, when rumors of Polybius were flitting among arcade goers and a night of entertainment meant a crossword puzzle or two. Unique and addicting, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes provides a fun and rewarding experience for either a single person or group of gamers.

Like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes itself, the story does not immediately reveal itself to you. It takes a bit of time and sleuthing before the yarn starts to unravel. When the game starts, you know very little about your character, a smartly-dressed woman who looks like she’d fit right in a noir spy film. As you piece together clues from dialogue and readable items, you learn that an eccentric man invited you to a secluded hotel, which houses strange puzzles, art exhibits, magic shows, and plenty of mysteries. And a dog too, which you can pet.

The puzzles range between pleasantly easy and surprisingly difficult, but none of them feel like cop-outs. You truly have almost everything you need at your fingertips, or they’re a few steps away. Some of them are incredibly easy, such as one requiring basic knowledge of Roman numerals or our English alphabet. But then you’d encounter one that makes you stare at it, feeling like you’re rubbing every single brain cell you have and getting nothing in return.

I vividly remember realizing the solution to a puzzle as I was falling asleep and then shooting up, wide awake, just to turn on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and rush to the location to input my answer. I was right, and that rush of serotonin was so strong that I continued to play until the sun was in the sky.

Part of the appeal lies in its more old school way of doing things. It brought me back to when I was a child, sitting in the waiting room of my piano teacher’s house and hunched over a book of riddles and whodunnits with a pen and notebook in hand. The Discord server I have for myself was full of pictures, notes, equations, and scribbles. I called on my roommate for help, as well as provided the puzzles without any context to my friends when I was stuck. Some of the puzzles prompted pretty lively discussion and I found it fascinating that this game, which can feel so isolating as you wander around the dreary hotel on your own, could bring so many people together without even being in my friends’ hands.

“Beautiful” might not be the first word that pops to mind when you see Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Indeed, according to Simogo’s development blog, that wasn’t the goal. But there’s something gripping about the retro aesthetic. I loved how clean and crisp the black-and-white color scheme is, with everything easily visible despite the grainy filter and odd textures. When colors appear, they pop, and they’re so eerie against the dark backdrop that they really stick in your mind. For a game that seems to do so little with its appearance, its blend of its many inspirations make for a singularly unique experience.

This is one of those games that I’ll think about even after I finish it. As of the time of writing, I still have quite a few mysteries to uncover, as there are some puzzles that just well and truly stumped me. The world it presents is a cryptic one, reminding me of old conspiracy theories from before my time, but it keeps you coming back for more, hankering to pull back the curtains and unlock the doors to discover the secrets behind them.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes will come out on the Nintendo Switch and Windows PC via Steam on May 16, 2024. Nintendo Switch version reviewed.

The post Review: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Makes You Feel Like the Smartest and Dumbest Person Alive appeared first on Siliconera.

Hello and welcome back to What To Play! We've returned from a little hiatus, which you definitely noticed and have been very sad about, of course. It's finally edging towards spring here in the UK, but don't let that tempt you into going outside, there's video games to be a-playin'!

As ever, this is where we'll round up the best games from the month gone by, and the things we're most excited to play from the month ahead - plus, any other suggestions for what might complement it. Here's What To Play This May 2024.

Availability: Out now on PC, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

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Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - the atmospheric new puzzle adventure from Simogo, perhaps best known as the extraordinarily talented team behind 2019's glorious Sayonara Wild Hearts - finally has a release date and is launching for Switch and Steam on 16th May.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, if you're unfamiliar, delivers a baroque blend of surreal mystery thriller and puzzle adventure - faintly bringing to mind the studio's iOS classic Device 6 - that follows a woman's search for answers, deep in a strange manor house.

As Simogo explained to Eurogamer last year, Lorelei features non-linear, third-person exploration built around 150 puzzles - many unfolding differently each playthrough - with players also able to interact with characters and tinkerable objects, from locks and cameras to computers and books, on their quest for truth. Oh, and there'll be a "lot of reading" too.

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Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - the atmospheric new puzzle adventure from Simogo, perhaps best known as the extraordinarily talented team behind 2019's glorious Sayonara Wild Hearts - finally has a release date and is launching for Switch and Steam on 16th May.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, if you're unfamiliar, delivers a baroque blend of surreal mystery thriller and puzzle adventure - faintly bringing to mind the studio's iOS classic Device 6 - that follows a woman's search for answers, deep in a strange manor house.

As Simogo explained to Eurogamer last year, Lorelei features non-linear, third-person exploration built around 150 puzzles - many unfolding differently each playthrough - with players also able to interact with characters and tinkerable objects, from locks and cameras to computers and books, on their quest for truth. Oh, and there'll be a "lot of reading" too.

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The surreal pop synth of Sayonara Wild Hearts may have been the game that put Swedish developer Simogo on the map for PC players, but for me their earlier iOS puzzler Device 6 stands in my memory as being one of the most distinctive video games I've played. An interactive mystery novel at its heart, Device 6 took full advantage of its mobile-based hardware, asking players to turn and rotate their device to read certain lines of text, and scroll through its chapters searching for audio visual clues to solve its puzzles. I've often lamented that it never made its way to other platforms, even though part of its magic is inherently tied to physicality of its tactile origins.

Happily, after playing a few hours of Simogo's latest game, Lorelei And The Laser Eyes it's clear this equally classy detective story shares much of the same DNA as Device 6. It has the same love of riddles and mysterious, cryptic puzzles, only now they're writ large in a fully explorable 3D setting - a monochrome and maze-like hotel belonging to a reclusive artist. But Simogo's love of text hasn't been diminished in the process. Early on you find an instruction manual for Lorelei And The Laser Eyes within the game itself, which straight away tells you to have a pen and paper nearby to help solve its numerous conundrums. Heck, publishers Annapurna Interactive even sent me a full-blown notebook in the post just to hammer it home. They're not kidding, either. Even the opening section of the game had me scribbling down names, sums and symbols, much like Tunic, Return Of The Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds did before it. Which is just as well, really, as I'll definitely be needing some reminders when I come to play the full version on May 16th.

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