Lorelei and the Laser Eyes released earlier this year on the PC and Nintendo Switch and has now come to the PS4 and PS5. Across its over a dozen hours of gameplay to beat the game, you will absolutely feel like you belong at Mensa by the time you beat this game without guides.
The gameplay is simple, to the point, but equally perplexing, challenging, and absolutely a must-play for fans of puzzle games.
Story
Contrary to the title, you do not play as Lorelei. You play as an unnamed woman hired to investigate a mysterious hotel, and that path leading to it and all of the story within the walls of the hotel are lined in mystery, puzzles, and lots of collectibles in a search for the truth. Including finding the title character.
The game does a brilliant job at the minimalist storytelling it does portray. There is no voice acting, cutscenes, or other major ways to move the story fowrard, the entire game relies on you being observant and fits in the “if you miss it, its gone” type of story.
The unnamed detective has a variety of tools to help her solve puzzles, aid her in other parts of the hotel, and ultimately uncover the mystery that lies in the complex walls of the building.
Gameplay & Presentation
The gameplay is realistically bioled down to 2 buttons - similar to that of ‘The Witness’ (2016). Every other button on the controller will open the menu for the detective, allowing you to explore your inventory and other tools for the investigation, while directly interacting with objects lets you enter the ‘puzzle’ phase of the game, where you have to find the clues in the environment or other places to solve the riddle before you.
There are ways to die in the game, and as such, I highly recommend saving often. In the end, the majority of your time will be spent doing laps around the building and figuring out what to do or where to go next with the information you have, but this is akin to the 90’s style of point and click adventure games that give you that satisfying ‘Aha!’ moment, that is very shortlived, as you then have to go through another and more harder gauntlet of puzzles.
The visual presentation is also something that is very distinct. It reminds me of ‘Sin City’ (2005) where the major theme is noir black and white, with a little bit of color thrown in now and again, but the fixed camera angles take you back to the early PS1 Resident Evil games as well.
There is nothing to write about in forms of the presentation, and if you are deciding between the PS4 and PS5 version of the game, the presentation makes little to no difference between the two as the PS5 version does not have any options to run the game in visual or fiedelity mode, so you are getting mirror image quality despite the generation difference.
Verdict
Once you get past the challenging puzzles that are generously spread across Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and work toward uncovering the truth, you feel rewarded for pushing your mental faculties to their limit. Every puzzle has a solution that can take you as little as 10 minutes to figure out and others can take you hours depending on if you are keeping track of it with a pen and paper at your side.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is truly one of the most memorable games I have played this year, and it does a lot of stuff that is new and old that makes me enjoy a game that geniunely made me scratch my head throughout my entire playthrough.
