Has anyone played this game? It’s not IF, but I imagine the correlation between people who play IF and would appreciate this game is rather high.
I finally had some time over the holidays and couldn’t put it down. It’s definitely the most thought-provoking game I’ve played in 2024, and I’m interested in sharing some thoughts and analysis with anyone else who’s completed it.
Played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes when it came out. You and I aren’t the only ones who thought of the IF angle: Zarf actually wrote about it. It’s a new favorite game of mine.
Two main things come to mind: this is very much a Resident Evil survival horror without the combat, and the game structure harmonizes well with the obsession for the search for pure art.
The first point is novel since I’ve always liked the puzzles in survival horror games. But since I have to deal with the combat, I never felt like I was in the right mode of thinking. The puzzles in Lorelei are also funny since they encourage overthinking, your worst enemy. Many of the solutions are simple, sometimes frustratingly so. They are a dime a dozen in these games.
The second point is, on the other hand, quite inspiring. There are games like The Witness and the first Talos Principle that play on the predilections of puzzle gamers seeing patterns everywhere to the point the games affect on their life, but they end their statement by saying it’s a matter of genius or emergence. Here, it mimics the desire to pursue a higher form of artistic truth that transcends capitalism and other grisly material conditions. But as anyone who completed Lorelei would know, much of the hubbub about the mysterious artist is exaggerated truths or plain nonsense. Many critics write obnoxious plaques because they don’t see the puzzles players are solving as puzzles, they see them as avant-garde pieces. In other words, they reify puzzles into the commodity known as Art with a capital A. This obscures the truth, the reason the artist created these puzzles, and so on.
So, I always thought this game was doing something similar to Repeat the Ending and LAKE ADVENTURE where the truths are repressed by game mechanics and players need to engage with said mechanics to reveal the truth. All three make a statement on how our criticism and enjoying of something may not align to why people create forms of art. And this gap is always hard to know and understand, but this is necessary since the relationship between art and viewer needs distance to be creative and productive. The most interesting discussions come from how art can be unknowable and yet we try to know it.
Glad there’s a thread on this game. I like it a lot.
I just finished playing this last week! I absolutely loved the first 90% of the game. I was a bit disappointed in the end because it conclusively answered some questions that I thought could’ve been left open to interpretation, while leaving open threads where I really wanted a resolution. Also, all the wandering around at the very end slowed the momentum for me. But overall I really loved the game’s aesthetic and how it intertwined puzzles and story. It was really impressive that there was so much repetition in the puzzles’ answers and yet they were still fun, plus getting the same answers over and over felt like hammering home the key facts in a way that I’ve never seen before.
I kind of wanted to go look for an explainer so I could understand the hazy parts, but I’m afraid that more certainty would lessen the experience I had. But it’s still interesting to read about other people’s experiences with the game!
This game was made by Simogo, who made a game called Device 6 that is a really lovely modernized piece of IF. Everyone should take a look at that if they want to see a great example of how you can make IF and meet modern players.
I believe it’s only for iOS.
Device 6 is so good! I should play it again, because I’ve definitely forgotten the details by now. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has a video game console in it with a list of games you can buy, and I got really excited because one of them is called Device 7, but it turns out it’s out of stock so you can’t actually play it….
This entire post will be heavy with spoilers.
it conclusively answered some questions that I thought could’ve been left open to interpretation, while leaving open threads where I really wanted a resolution
I had a similar reaction—but on further reflection I find it rather tricky to pin down precisely what has been conclusively answered!
The simplest reading of the game’s events, as reinforced by the ending puzzle sequence, is that we are Lorelei Weiss in 2014. Hotel Letztes Jahr is a collage of memories of her time there in 1963 while working on Renzo Nero’s film/performance art piece “The Third Eye” along with fictional elements pulled from that film. We are helping Lorelei recover those memories and process the trauma and guilt of murdering Renzo in 1963 (at Renzo’s direction and in self-defense). The puzzles in the game (and especially the maze) protect this truth and represent both Lorelei’s Alzheimer’s and memory suppression.
But even this simplest reading is not free of problems and contradictions:
I’ve been struggling to make sense of two aspects of the story in particular:
“Signorina, is this your story? If it is so, I want you to confess.”
“What do you mean? This is all your story.”
What actually happened in 1963?
Our understanding of events comes mainly from:
Which of these, if any, can we trust? Lorelei “remembers it all” and has an eidetic memory, so it’s not out of the question that “The Third Eye” script pages, still scenes, and police files are objective truth. (How did she get the police files? Maybe she filed an FOIA request at some point?) It’s also heavily implied that the “lost script pages” are Lorelei’s recollections of 1963, though they do not physically exist as a written script.
Can we trust the Renzo Nero film cases? There are striking patterns throughout his body of work that help us understand “The Third Eye”: all of his films feature protagonists with initial R. played by “black” actors, and one or more supporting “white” actors with initial L. Eyes and eye allusions (e.g. St. Lucy) are everywhere, as are recursion and transformation. The story of Renate and Lorenzo in “The Third Eye” fits these patterns perfectly.
It’s unclear to me if any actual filming took place, but either way it seems clear that Renzo invited Lorelei onto the project as a pretext: he doesn’t understand or care much for her digital art, and is mostly concerned with her playing the role of Lorenzo in a parallel recreation of “The Third Eye,” to achieve his goal of Cinema Sostenuto, art created for the cosmos rather than for human eyes.
Some specific questions I have, under the “what actually happened in 1963?” umbrella:
“Who’s wielding the paintbrush? Where does the red come from?”
The references to the Third Eye throughout the game leave its precise nature quite murky, though there are some common elements:
The Owl Girl and Lorenzo ascribe a supernatural origin to the Third Eye, and presumably so does Renzo; he certainly did believe he had the power to strike a “death blow to materialistic society” through his art, and that he (and Lorelei?) possessed vision beyond human eyes that “look but cannot see.”
Lorelei believed in the Third Eye at least enough to (reluctantly) participated in the 1982 expedition to Sulawesi. And it makes perfect sense that a pioneer of digital art would appreciate the power of creation unlocked by computers. But is there anything supernatural actually going on in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes? Or does Lorelei see the Third Eye mainly as metaphor?
man 
it looks really cool…
This is a good summary of what actually happened in the story:
Also, note that Discourse (the engine the forum uses) has spoilers. I know there are people who have not played the game and are reading the thread, and a good chunk of them wants to play the game after seeing the rave reception!
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
I know there are people who have not played the game and are reading the thread, and a good chunk of them wants to play the game after seeing the rave reception!
Sure, I’ve added a spoiler tag to the thread.
I’ve read through the guide, and I agree with the broad strokes.
A few minor quibbles:
In Renzo’s biography, it’s stated that he goes to an art show and calls Lorelei a “woman with laser eyes,” eventually contracting her to make an art piece for him–the OCU-3 supercomputer.
I had the impression that Renzo commissioned a digital maze created on the computer, not the computer itself (which was shipped to the Hotel and assembled already in the first script page / 3D still scene)? Is the OCU-3 Lorelei’s “parodic computer”? I don’t get the sense that the OCU-3 fails at all tasks given, from either the flashbacks or the discussion of the OCU-3 in the Connected snippet.
But I don’t think Renzo cared much about the maze or the computer, anyway.
Through this, Renzo accomplishes his artistic goals, creating a piece that requires no audience–one that only the performers could appreciate (an artistic idea regularly alluded to or directly stated throughout Renzo’s many interviews).
Is this actually true? I don’t get the impression that Renzo thought even the performers needed to appreciate the piece: “[a] piece of art exists in itself and for itself” and “not for human eyes.”
Although that raises the question: why did Renzo hire Lorelei? Because her “laser eyes” allows her to appreciate the piece in a way that an ordinary audience would not? That seems contradictory to Renzo’s philosophy. So if not as a spectator, and not for her art per se, then because Renzo saw her as an integral part of the work. Because her last name is “white” and her first name starts with L.? (?!)
I’m curious what y’all thought about the “ludonarrative dissonance” of the game: narratively it’s a mystery game, but the gameplay it’s a drugstore puzzle book.
I separately enjoyed both those things, but can’t decide if I think they worked as a whole… like, did the complex astrological clock mean anything to the story or the characters, or is it just there to pad things out?
There’s an ongoing discussion in the escape room world about this—why would it make sense for this prison cell/abandoned hospital/serial killer’s basement to be full of puzzles that you can use to solve your way out? Usually the reason is “because it’s a fun puzzle game, don’t worry about it,” but sometimes there are story explanations that can work, and the most common one seems to be “because the person who put you here really likes puzzles.”
That’s the explanation I had in mind while playing this game. The fact that Lorelei created all those puzzle boxes etc. makes her seem very much puzzle-minded, and if you think about the house and its contents as a creation of her dying mind, the puzzles could be a manifestation of the fixations and blocks that she needed to get through in order to access the truth she’d been hiding. The repetition of key years as puzzle answers might also support that theory.
That said, I have no idea what the astrological clock means. I guess everything’s just snippets of a life? This is kind of why I didn’t think the game held together as well in the end, even though I loved the first 90%.
I had the same question about the final puzzle:
what’s the significance of assigning one of the three dates to each room of the hotel? There doesn’t seem to be any relationship or pattern between the people in those rooms or events that happened in those years. Moreover if I understand correctly, the solution is randomly scrambled every play-through.
So that was pretty disappointing to me. If activating the OCU-3 represents unscrambling Lorelei’s factual and fictional memories, I would have hoped for some narrative meaning underlying the puzzle solution.
Cool - thank you both! I think that all makes sense to me…
Reflecting on this more… I think I mentally trend to give a pass to games where the story is clearly surface “theming” or purely aesthetic; I’ve certainly played and enjoyed a bunch of games like this without ever having it bag at me the way it did here. (And the escape rooms I’ve done all fall in this category…) But Lorelei is clearly a game that takes its story very seriously and asks you to do work to figure it out, and it grates more when that work doesn’t cash out in any way.