Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Reviews

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a wonderfully intricate, amazing piece of game design. It's intimidating and challenging, but it rewards all the effort you put into it. One of the best games of 2024 so far.

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.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is magnificently crafted, oozing with detail, love, and care. What it does amazingly is give you all the tools you need to figure out this mystery within the hotel.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an incredibly stylish puzzler that, during my time with it, continued to beguile right to the end. By allowing you relatively free reign of the hotel to complete its assortment of riddles and puzzles in any order, I never felt like I had reached a stumbling block, often being allowed to come back to every puzzle later and complete other in-game tasks that I had put on the back burner.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a truly singular game that demonstrates a distilled ambition for what the medium can achieve. It skillfully takes the foundation from its survival horror ancestry and manages to transition into something that transcends the screen and even the controller, to engage a player in a totally unique way. While this ambition to immerse isn't without wrinkles, I can't help but be staggered with how much is achieved here and the boundaries that are crossed in the process. In some ways, Lorelei demonstrates just how far the medium can be stretched and pushed to draw a player in, beyond the act alone of picking up a controller. You're invited to live this story, and that's precisely what you should do.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of those games you shouldn't read too much about before playing it. By design, it's packed to the rafters with layers upon layers of puzzles, and discussing this web of head-scratchers — or even its story — would be to undo a little bit of its magic.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: thank you Annapurna for not being afraid to publish games that are truly one of a kind. Games like Cocoon, Stray, Neon White, and The Artful Escape all provide engaging and yet completely unique experiences. So when I heard that Simogo (the developer behind Sayonara Wild Hearts) was once again teaming up with Annapurna to release a new puzzle game, I knew that I had to check it out.

With Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo weaves together interlocking puzzles, infinite timelines, and supernatural mischief with only minimal clumsiness.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes’ setup is bland compared to the others in the puzzle genre. You are a bespectacled woman carrying a clutch who walks with incredible poise into a mansion with little understanding of why you are there or what you are doing. The lack of context doesn’t matter, though, because the game immediately showers you with an incredible sense of mood. You may not know why you are petting the dog in the courtyard, checking every door, or reading every scrap of paper you come across initially, but you want to be there and see everything the game has to offer. And if you’re like me, it morphs from a want to a need that keeps you up entirely too late, pointing your phone’s flashlight at a piece of scrap paper already overflowing with notes incomprehensible to any outside observer.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a unique, distinct, and memorable experience that leverages the strengths of video games as a storytelling medium. It is recommended for anyone who is interested in mystery stories or adventure games.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of Simogo's finest achievements, expertly interlocking its cryptic puzzle design with a chilling narrative.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an intense puzzle box game that draws you in deeper the more of its mysteries you unravel. Yes, it can be frustrating, but the satisfaction you feel for completing each puzzle is heightened because it asks so much more of you as a player. The story that seems unimportant at first quickly becomes an engrossing and stylistic mystery thriller that will keep you guessing until the end, staying up for just one more hour in the hopes of seeing the next twist or big reveal.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the most striking and inventive puzzle games I’ve ever played, an eccentric, stylish mystery box full of riddles, supernatural characters, and a devilishly cool art style. Incredibly tactile and intentionally vague in its confusing but intriguing narrative, it’s an experience that refuses to hold your hand, offering difficult challenges of the mind and solutions hidden in every corner, or sometimes even in plain sight. It’s a game that gets stuck in ...

David Lynch would be proud of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It’s wild, clever and compelling in the best of ways, absurd in its visual style and challenging in its puzzles. Do not let this one pass you by.

The stage is set. Imagine an old baroque manor, perhaps a hotel or a museum, somewhere in central Europe. A woman wanders in search of answers. Nintendo Switch version reviewed. Review copy provided by publisher.

Grab a notebook. Every answer is another mystery in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a fantastic cerebral and surreal puzzle game that could be an all-timer.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes developer Simogo has long since proven themselves capable developers. Their 2012 iOS game, Year Walk, is a haunting horror adventure game that I strongly recommend grabbing on Steam. More famously, Simogo created one of the best games of 2019 and one of the best indie games of all time with Sayonara Wild Hearts, the heart pumping rhythm platform adventure through a pop album. I was hoping that their newest title would live up to my high expectations, but unfortunately Lorelei and the Laser Eyes just isn’t it. While very competently made with a direct vision, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes obstructs the player at every turn and is almost never fun to play.

“The cryptic Lorelei and the Laser Eyes may very well be the greatest puzzle game ever made.”

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the most unique-looking games you'll see on the Switch, and it's got the substance to back up the style. Its heavy emphasis on puzzles and its refusal to throw players a bone when they need help may not be to everyone's tastes, but anyone up for a mental challenge in what's essentially an elaborate escape room will love it.

It would be an immense understatement to say Simogo have made the five-year wait for their follow-up release worth it. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes defies not just genre conventions, but that of tone, aesthetic and even presentation to craft a game of wild imagination and even wilder a delivery. Yet for all its leisurely skirting the boundaries between one perceived tone or form of presentation to the next, none of what is experienced amid the Hotel Letztes Jahr feels distracting or otherwise ill-fitting. Be it at its most satirical, surreal, strange, and on some occasions, psychologically unsettling. A masterfully-orchestrated series of puzzles that are both stand-alone and interconnected alike, a brilliant use of a more-restricted color palette emboldening its art-style and aesthetic. And best of all: one of the most curious, perplexing but ultimately satisfying mysteries to see fully unraveled and revealed in its truest form. Combined, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes stands as Simogo's best work to date. Even with a portfolio as creative as theirs, a release deserving of that most lofty of titles: magnum opus.

Annapurna Interactive is renowned for publishing innovative titles that push the boundaries of video games as an art form. After a successful partnership with Simogo on the techno road trip, Sayonara Wild Hearts, the duo take a sharp left turn for their new venture, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Swapping the neon-lit, musical adventure for a monochromatic, puzzle murder mystery, their new exploit couldn’t be more different. Will this departure deliver an experience as mesmerizing and memorable as their previous release?

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is easily one of the best games in the puzzle genre and is nearly perfect on the Steam Deck.

Perplexing and often pretentious, yet compelling and wonderfully accomplished, it's safe to say you won't have played anything quite like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes before. Filled with puzzles and mystery at every turn, once you step foot inside the intriguing Hotel Letztes Jahr, you won't be able to pull yourself way.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes isn’t a perfect game. It isn’t a game for everyone, and even fans of puzzle games like the Zero Escape series might find that this isn’t their tastes. In a world filled with Michael Bay, this is Luis Bunuel. It’s a game created with a distinct vision that isn’t out to please everyone. This isn't a game that cares about being liked by everyone: it cares about being loved by a smaller group. It’s a puzzle box where any narrative is almost an afterthought. It’s there, if you dig into it, but the greater satisfaction comes from finding a way forward.

You will never be able to stop thinking about Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The latest game from developer Simogo, the team behind 2019’s Sayonara Wild Hearts and 2013’s buzzy, puzzly adventure game Device 6, will burn itself into your mind. That remains true even when you aren’t actively playing it, and continues long after you’ve solved its final puzzle.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes fails to capture its intended mystery-filled story because of having to headbutt against puzzles non-stop and some glaring control issues.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes can sometimes feel like the Dark Souls of puzzle games, but no one will regret challenging themselves to solve its many mysteries. Players who enjoy analyzing complex stories will have a blast taking apart the many layers to Lorelei and the Laser Eye's bizarre tale, while those looking for an addicting puzzle game will find it to be an incredibly satisfying adventure. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a must-play puzzle game and one of the genre's best.

A wonderfully stylish game with puzzles that will have you pondering way beyond the confines of your playtime. The whole mysterious package is nicely wrapped up in a plot that will have you guessing just as much as the varied conundrums.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an intricate puzzle box of interconnected parts. At times it can feel overwhelming, but ultimately this stylish noir's captivating puzzle design anthology and spellbinding story feels like an entirely new and contemporary kind of puzzle game.