I've bought enough new games over the past few weeks that it would have taken a lot for me to stomach adding another title to the pile. Or so I thought, until the soundtrack for this popped up in my YouTube Music recommendations and I found out that it was the next game from the Sayonara Wild Hearts team. I mean, what was I going to do? Listen to it without getting the proper context first?

So I ended up going into this totally blind, and it's a trip. The game cold opens on your character standing next to a car with nothing to orient yourself beyond the objective "meet him at the hotel". The controls are minimalist as they come - directional movement plus one contextual "interact" action that's mapped to every button - which means the game doesn't even need to give you the familiarity of throwing up those familiar button prompts. It's an intimidating start, and kicks off a vibe of unfamiliarity that persists through the whole game, but beneath that feeling the puzzle design is actually quite forgiving. Both the puzzles and the information you need to solve them is pretty clearly signposted, so even if you haven't figured out how to manipulate that information to get an answer yet, it never feels like you might be missing something.

I've seen other reviews treat Lorelei as a sort of "meta" puzzle game, in the vein of recent hits Void Stranger or Animal Well, and although the surreal presentation and frequent use of mixed-media sequences lend themselves to that impression, I think fundamentally it's a much more traditional style of puzzle game. I've also seen people liken it to the puzzle sections of classic survival horror games, and while that's not wrong (there are a few sections that make this influence quite obvious) the lack of combat and horror make the sentiment kind of misleading. Personally, I'd describe it as something more akin to room escape games from the Flash game era, or maybe Safecracker (does anyone else remember Safecracker?). Just with more substance, and a heck of a lot more style. The game is also a lot more convenient with its storage of information than its presentation might lead you to believe, although I'd definitely still echo its recommendation to keep a physical notebook handy.

A lot of factors go into making the puzzles in Lorelei feel special, though. The hotel that serves as the setting has a great sense of place to it: rooms like the library and the art gallery are densely packed with puzzles and information in a way that other rooms aren't, simply because it would make sense for a real person to organize things that way. That choice lends itself to a weird kind of pacing, where the player often receives huge bursts of information at once, and it can feel overwhelming to try and keep track of it all. But the setting is small and dense enough that you don't really have to; you can just meander in any direction and you'll probably make progress somewhere before too long. Additionally, the puzzles are all deeply intertwined with the setting, characters, and story. This contributes to the initial feeling of confusion when you first start, since even the most basic details about what you're doing are used as puzzle elements, but it also means that you'll be paying attention to and piecing together the story naturally as you work your way through the puzzles.

Mechanically, there are some very interesting vectors by which puzzles are presented and solved which I won't spoil, but the vast majority of your time will be spent finding codes to open locks. This could easily get tiresome, but Lorelei puts in the work to make even opening locks feel good by providing a wide variety of lock types and giving each one a nice tactile feel despite the simplified control scheme. I do wish the dedication to minimalism hadn't spread to the UI, though, as you'll be referencing your handy photographic memory a lot and without a dedicated "back" button it takes as long to navigate back out of a particular file as it does to navigate into it.

If you know Simogo's previous work, I probably don't have to tell you that the game looks and sounds fantastic. It can be hard to parse visually at times, especially at the beginning before you've grown used to the effects, but the signposting is clear enough that this doesn't get in the way of gameplay. One effect I particularly like is the way the geometry in the hotel seems to be textured or masked with fragments of photographs, which sells the anachronistic feel in a very visceral way. The soundtrack is also great, although being isolated to in-world phonographs that you have to find and start means that I didn't actually get to listen to it as much as I would have preferred. Obviously there are not an EP's worth of bangin' vocal tracks here the way there were in Sayonara Wild Hearts, and I won't hold that against the game. But it's a shame that the only vocal track we do get (outside of the credits) is only 90 seconds long, because it's been stuck in my head since the moment I first heard it.

In summary, I highly recommend Lorelei and the Laser Eyes to any fan of room-escape style puzzle games. It does a lot to seem inaccessible, in both story and gameplay, but it does at least as much work actually being quite accessible on both fronts.

(I still have no clue what the shortcut puzzle about the teeth is supposed to mean though)