A lot of tears have been shed and drinks poured out over the “death” of the classic point-and-click adventure game. While some stalwarts like Return to Monkey Island have valiantly kept the torch burning, the days of walking around 2D environments shoving seemingly unrelated items into your pockets and then pushing them up against equally random objects in cryptic combinations have largely passed. With that in mind, it seems especially fitting that Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, the latest from Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo, is a puzzle game very much about gazing back through the tangle of time (in more ways than one). The striking style of this exceptionally clever adventure may not look familiar on the surface, but at its heart, it’s the closest thing I’ve played to a modernization of what a point-and-click adventure could be. Its story is enticingly fresh, its vibes perfectly eerie, and the desire it evokes to uncover every inch of its intricately interwoven mystery is irresistible.
You take on the role of Lorelei, whose story begins in the dark woods outside of a looming manor with little direction beyond a strange invitation to an exhibit there that promises to transcend art itself – one that she might also be a part of? Lorelei and the Laser Eyes prides itself on its obfuscation, rarely giving you a straight answer to any of the questions it raises or telling you what the heck is actually going on – and that’s notable, because it starts at “curiously unexplained” and only gets wilder from there. But that enigmatic attitude never drove me toward frustration over the 13 hours it took me to beat it, always enticing me to uncover the answers for myself in a way that feels natural rather than laborious or obligatory.
Doing so generally has you directing Lorelei from fixed camera angles as she walks the black and white halls of this manor, bumping up against a cavalcade of locked doors that you’ll slowly but surely figure out how to open. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, that could involve decoding the meaning behind a nearby poster to decipher the correct combination for a padlock, or it could require circling back much later once you’ve found a key somewhere else. The entire manor is one big puzzle box (with many literal puzzle boxes tucked inside it as well), and figuring out how to move more easily through its halls, which doors to open next, and the right position for each piece to click into place is a consistent thrill.
This estate is also a masterfully assembled contraption because it seamlessly weaves in an immense amount of freedom alongside more curated encounters. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is the kind of game that’s a delight to talk about with friends as you compare the physical notes you’ve taken and revel in having solved a particularly tricky challenge – but it’s also a difficult one to discuss, because its relatively open layout means you could be tackling some of its puzzles in very different orders. It strikes an ideal balance between letting you just figure things out and driving you toward key story moments or conversations with its scant cast of characters, all of which are wittily written and tantalizingly obtuse in equal measure.
The types of puzzles you’ll solve also have an impressive variety to them. Some take the form of literal puzzle books, having you work out straightforward but entertaining number problems to get a solution to an obstacle blocking your path. Others are spatial puzzles that ask you to walk around a room and look at things from a very specific perspective to reveal the answer. Then there are those that will have you deciphering (relatively simple) secret messages in letters or documents, filling your inventory with items and objects that will inevitably be used elsewhere, dialing numbers on a telephone at the manor’s front desk to get outside help, or lots more – many of them asking you to dive into the history of Lorelei herself and the events playing out around her in a way that satisfyingly links all your actions to the compelling story at hand. There are even a few sections that drop you into the spooky, Resident Evil-inspired halls of an in-universe video game, complete with PlayStation-era graphics and hilariously clunky tank control movement.
However, that joke about the bad controls of olde would be funnier if Simogo hadn’t been so committed to the idea that Lorelei and the Laser Eyes should be a single-button game, a limitation that can be interesting but more often works against it. Apart from moving around with a thumbstick or WASD (and opening the settings), every single button does the same thing: It pulls up your menu when you aren’t near anything, interacts with stuff when you are, selects items in your inventory, cycles through the numbers on combination locks, and attempts to unlock them when you think you have the right answer. There isn’t even a dedicated back button in the menus. While this comparison will come across harsher than I mean it to be, the last game I reviewed to try something like this was Balan Wonderworld, and I hate it just as much here as I did there.
This utterly pointless self-restriction adds unnecessary friction to moving around and solving puzzles. The only way to stop looking at a lock is to intentionally try an incorrect code. If you want to examine an item, book, or note in your inventory while trying to find the right combination, you have to physically step away from the lock before you can access the menu (and if you are in a tight space with other interactable objects, you might walk into their range and select them instead). If you forget where you are going and need to quickly glance at the map, you have to go three menu lists deep before you can then select the map for only a specific floor… and then have to scroll to “exit” buttons on those lists to get back out.
Simogo co-founder Simon Flessler said in an interview that part of the justification for this control scheme was to make Lorelei and the Laser Eyes as broadly accessible as possible – but while that’s a goal I admire, it’s not one that would be compromised in any way I can see by also including the option to use dedicated buttons that quickly exit an interface or pull up the map. The absence of those basic features by no means ruins the experience of playing this otherwise extremely smartly designed game, and if they are the price I have to pay then so be it, but it is an obnoxious blemish on a moody world I was otherwise completely enthralled by.
That world is at least captivating enough to smooth over most rough edges. This isn’t a horror game, but it does wear the clothes of one occasionally, putting you on edge and teasing at the terrors that bind its puzzles together. There are only a couple of actual “scares,” and the small handful of outright fail states are very explicitly telegraphed, so you’ll never feel like you got something you didn’t sign up for if you’re mostly interested in carefully considered problem solving. But Lorelei and the Laser Eyes does do a fantastic job of unsettling you as you go, using its beautiful black-and-white visual style with pops of neon to create haunting, abstract imagery that can sometimes be as anxiety-inducing as any monster.
