Lorelei and The Laser Eyes review – Stylish Swedish secrets

I won’t often choose to pick up a puzzle game unless I am playing alongside a friend. However, it’s games like this that remind me that I should give them more of a chance. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is stylish, a little funny, and certainly satisfying if you have the patience.

A slow starter

While playing Lorelei and The Laser Eyes for review, I have to admit that it took my brain more than a minute to get warmed up to the process. It had been a long time since I had played a puzzle game like this, and I don’t even do crosswords or sudoku in my spare time. I hardly have a brain prepared for cryptics.

However, after an hour or so of playtime, things started to come together. I began to understand how the game was trying to fool me with the way it constructed its brain teasers. It was at this point that Lorelei and The Laser Eyes started to become fun, and I really got into the swing of things.

Lorelei and The Laser Eyes isn’t a game that will hold your hand or nervously prod you in the right direction. If you’re not getting something, that’s your problem, and you can figure it out for yourself. At first, this was frustrating as I wandered around the admittedly beautiful set pieces. I just felt like I was aimlessly looking at things, collecting items, and bashing my head into walls.

However, as I mentioned, after about an hour or so into my review time of Lorelei and The Laser Eyes, everything started falling into place. This felt fantastic. All of a sudden, I started to notice the patterns or remembered back to a note or book I had glossed over. I realized that nothing was filler and everything I had been collecting was somehow relevant. This is where the study began.

So, although the start was a bit of a slog, once things began to reveal themselves, I found myself hurriedly walking around the whole map, slowly piecing things together. It was this that kept me booting up Lorelei and The Laser Eyes, enjoying the satisfaction of pushing my brain to its limits.

A visual treat

Simogo opted for an interesting visual choice when putting together this puzzle game. The fixed camera moves like CCTV as it tracks Lorelei around the map. The art style is reminiscent of both charcoal drawings and collages as the slightly disjointed and mostly black and white set pieces move around you.

At first, I felt the bland coloring would bore me as I spent hours wandering around the mansion and grounds. However, it rarely did, and I found it helped a lot with my concentration and drew my eye to where it needed to be.

Jarring accents of red are used around Lorelei and The Laser Eyes, denoting less the clues in the game and more simply adding atmosphere. Once or twice, the splashes of laser red would signify a clue, but more often than not, they just acted as areas of foreboding.

Each new area I unlocked during my review run of Lorelei and The Laser Eyes contained a wealth of new clues and tricks to uncover. It was the subtle coloring and black-and-white palette that helped me narrow down what I was looking for. I feel that a room full of brightness and excitement would be simply too distracting. As it stands, the game looks like the pages of a mystery novel, with red accents marking key points and core characters.

The grey coloring may not be for everyone, but it is certainly not a distraction, and it shows off some stylish animation work from Simogo. However, there are a few problems with the brightness levels when playing on Switch and PC. It can often become hard to see the screen, which is kind of essential in a puzzle game like Lorelei and The Laser Eyes. I certainly missed things a few times due to dark corners.

The pacing of puzzles

As I mentioned before, sometimes I would be stuck in Lorelei and The Laser Eyes while playing through for this review. I am not the most patient man in the world. Without shame, I will admit that I turned the game off and switched to something else several times. I can only stare at a number puzzle for so long before I question what I’m doing with my life.

There are many, many puzzles in Lorelei and The Laser Eyes, which is pretty on-brand for, you know, a puzzle game. But, sometimes, they just get a little too much for me. This is a game with a certain pacing that isn’t meant for long periods of play. At least, not for me.

I found that I took the most enjoyment by playing in fits and starts. Throughout my playtime, I would hop in, collect a few more clues, figure out a couple of puzzles, and dip out again. I think I did most of my playing outside of the game rather than in it. Often, I would find myself thinking about the game in my day-to-day, only later realizing what I had missed.

This meant that whenever I turned it on, I had a whole bunch of new things to try, and often, they worked. I liked the fact that the game occupied my mind when I wasn’t playing. It meant I could essentially still play while away from my PC. However, being stuck in the game can be very frustrating, just staring endlessly into the grey visuals, slowly frying my brain.

I think the game lends itself to a slower playstyle, perfectly suited for a long journey or casual handheld play. Playing with a friend or on a long car journey would be ideal. The puzzles beg to be discussed and worked out as a group. Figuring out a puzzle in Lorelei and The Laser Eyes was so much more satisfying as a pair as you collect together the joint information you can both remember.

Maybe too simple

The controls are stripped back to the point that it might be a little too simplified. The whole game can be played with one hand on a PC and requires very little on a Switch. This makes movement slow, and menu navigation glacial. Lorelei and The Laser Eyes required me to endlessly dip in and out of menus, and this was beyond tedious.

I feel like the menu system could have been reworked to be a lot more intuitive. As you make your way around the game, finding and recovering new clues, they are stored in the menus. Over and over again, you must dig through memories and documents to find relevant information, and as the single-button navigation system does its thing, a huge amount of time is lost.

Lorelei herself is a slow-moving character. She can be fed coffee to speed up, but her sluggishness does start to grind eventually. Admittedly, the map isn’t exactly huge, and the corridors are tight, but again, time is constantly ticking away as she potters around the game. I’m not expecting breakneck speed, but some haste would be nice.

The mystery goes beyond the puzzles

The plot of Lorelei and The Laser Eyes had me wondering if maybe my review edition of the game was in the wrong language. As the narrative begins, it is very vague, and it isn’t about to make itself much clearer as it goes on. Working out the storyline is as much of a puzzle as the mysteries in the game itself are, and this is kind of fun.

As I played through the game and talked to the various characters, I slowly figured out just what was going on with the storyline. The reveal was gradual, teased, and, typical of the game, satisfying.

The various characters and plot twists that slowly become clear as the game goes on are well put together and wonderfully bizarre. This is no ordinary plot, and the situation is very odd. Lorelei and The Laser Eyes play on the idea of the unknown, intertwining the surreal with elements of horror and murder mystery, all wrapped up in a dream-like situation. For me, the complex, and disarming reveals of just what it is that’s going on was a big part of the pleasure.

Without giving too much away, there is a lot more to be discovered beyond just the, uh, physical realm she seems to be existing in. The game happily snapped me out of the reality of the game with new curveballs and environments rich in clues and plot devices.

Is Lorelei and The Laser Eyes the game for you?

As I mentioned previously in the review, Lorelei and The Laser Eyes was not a session game for me, yet, it took up more time than my Steam hours let on. I spent time thinking about it on the beach, in the gym, and while out shopping. My mind stored and sorted the information I had taken in, and then I was able to dig back in with fresh “Laser Eyes” when I sat back down to it later. I loved the game for this, and it was endlessly satisfying.

If you have a long journey or some other tedious gap to deal with, I can’t recommend this game enough to fill your time. If you want a game that you can throw up on your TV and play with your partner, family, or even friends, amassing your brain power to figure out satisfying and mysterious puzzles, this is a banger. Or, if you just want a very stylish and well-written game that will send you off to sleep at night puzzling through word and number conundrums, I would suggest Lorelei and The Laser Eyes as a good option.

Puzzle games aren’t usually my jam, but I have certainly enjoyed getting my teeth into this one. I am glad I picked it up for review, and I will certainly be recommending Lorelei and The Laser Eyes to several people. It’s not breaking any boundaries, and seasoned puzzlers may find it easy, but for me, the fun and intriguing plot was perfectly wrapped up with problems that kept the pace interesting and resulted in plenty of eureka moments. Something I have for too few of in my life.