The long-running debate over video games as art is fortunately mostly a thing of the past, though it’s often up to indie games to help prop up any arguments that still rage. Obviously what makes a game – or any piece of media – art is a complex and largely subjective issue. You might point to the aesthetic approach, the narrative, or the interplay between presentation and mechanics. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes ticks all of these boxes and is perhaps the closest you’ll get to arthouse cinema in modern gaming.
The aesthetic of Lorelei is immediately striking, with its largely monochromatic palette clearly echoing the golden age of black and white movies. The minimalistic artstyle manages to be both retro and timeless, generally doing so without generally relying on aping the pixelated or polygonal graphics of bygone eras.
Much of Lorelei takes place in relative quiet, with your explorations being accompanied mostly by the loud echo of your footsteps. Whilst much of the soundtrack is little more than an ambient drone, there are some memorable tunes to be heard with Radio Waves and the title track being particular standouts.
Exploring the world of Lorelei feels like a fusion of survival horror and Myst-like puzzles, but with a more mathematical turn. You explore a mysterious mansion with a multitude of locked doors and incongruous mechanisms, but there is no weaponry or combat to be found here. Initially your exploration is very limited and linear, but as you progress you’ll find a series of shortcut doors that require specific mathematical or logical puzzles to be solved. The maths here is more along the lines of pattern recognition rather than complex sums or algebra that would have you breaking out graph paper and a graphical calculator, so you don’t need to worry if you haven’t simplified an equation for a few years. Every face button has the same function, which is perhaps my only real complaint – the lack of a quick back button to exit the inventory menu soon becomes a little irritating.
The various rooms of Lorelei’s mansion contain a dizzying number of documents and notes that serve as clues for the puzzles you’ll encounter. Whilst items are mostly restricted to keys (and objects that work as keys) you’ll be referring to your notes constantly. Despite the easy access to your file of documents, I also made extensive use of pen and paper to plot out ideas, possible answers to riddles and make notes of shapes and patterns. This aspect really brought me back to a much older style of gaming, as well as making the game a fantastically engaging form of impromptu multiplayer with my teenage children. Only one person can control what happens, but the puzzles really come into their own with multiple perspectives.
The narrative of Lorelei is as labyrinthine as the mansion in which it takes place. You play as a young Lorelei who must explore the home of her much older self and unravel the mysteries of her life. The game is closely intertwined with visual art, classic cinema, and screenwriting and the end result is a fascinating mixture of media that manages to be more than the sum of its parts.
It even manages to engage with the history of gaming with one subquest involving a haunted PS1-era game – the one time that the game does lean in on retro polygonal graphics – which you enter and have to deliberately glitch out following clues hidden in the documents found around the house. This is a perfect example of the multi-layered nature of the puzzles in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. There are some small standalone moments but much of the game is magnificently interwoven. I’m hoping to find time to play through it again in order to unpick the twists and turns in the narrative soon.
