BiggestKai
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2023
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes came out last year to decent success.
It's a puzzle game that's vaguely resident-evil ish, you have a big mansion/hotel to walk through where every room contains some locked door that needs to puzzled out or something. It's also quite fun and the short version is that I highly recommend you play it before viewing any of the spoiler quotes/review below. I hope you enjoy this recommendation even though it's not perfect. Get a pen and paper or some notepad because you'll need it even if the game has a photographic memory section that holds screenshots of all the documents you've found.
I won't discuss the plot because it's just a lot more fun to experience with all the cool shit the game pulls than to spell out in a summary. It's not special and nothing bad, but amusingly enough one of the steam guide "explained" posts implies one of the characters is gay(he isn't) because he says he isn't flirting with your character.
Anyways the game is really gud if you're into esoteric puzzlers. Go for it and come back and call me an asshole for recommending something you didn't like or something.
It's a puzzle game that's vaguely resident-evil ish, you have a big mansion/hotel to walk through where every room contains some locked door that needs to puzzled out or something. It's also quite fun and the short version is that I highly recommend you play it before viewing any of the spoiler quotes/review below. I hope you enjoy this recommendation even though it's not perfect. Get a pen and paper or some notepad because you'll need it even if the game has a photographic memory section that holds screenshots of all the documents you've found.
Puzzling in Lorelei is mainly being given a keypad, puzzle box or some number input device and asking you to solve it.
There are some outliers, mainly symbols instead of numbers but ultimately it comes back to you inputting some representation of numbers.
Very rarely there's some perspective puzzling where the game expects you to mentally rotate an object(sometimes physically) in your mind
These puzzles aren't always hinted at. the game obviously starts you off really easy by having puzzle solutions be in a document you've just read, to telling you what document or what the solution is but having some form of trick as to how you're meant to input the code(for example there's a random group of movie posters next to four digit keypads, whose movie cassettes containing the four digit year of release are given to you later. Each movie poster is re-arranged in some fashion and asks you to mentally re-arrange the year of release in the same way. The poster may be mirrored, or split into four quarters and shuffled, or the half of one poster may be appended to the half of the other), to finally giving you just weird symbols and hoping you can correlate that solution to whatever puzzle you haven't solved yet. Usually the latter class of puzzle is extremely good but sometimes it falls into the trap of you having the correct answer but having some tiny discrepancy as to how the dev expects you to enter said puzzle solution(Caps sensitivity in bug report 2, the cemetery mausoleum
Some more vital/optional puzzles such as opening shortcut doors and document tubes that contain maps to the various floors of the hotel are straight up given to you in a big book, it's all just math puzzles like correlating architectural sketches to a total cost of a room, or little brain teasers. These are also really good.
Without spoiling too much there's also a really good final puzzle that reminds me a bit of TUNIC and it's 60+ input code you need for the (true) ending. It's this big super computer with three parts to its login, a username, a password and then a setting.
The username would be obvious after playing for a bit, but the keys are all weird symbols that you have to relate to actual alphabets via three separate puzzle "quest lines" that each give you a piece of the puzzle.
The password was a lot more obtuse but once it clicked it made me feel like I had a four digit IQ. the difficulty of it comes from the fact that it's all in one spot but unless you take your time to actually explore that spot the initial solution becomes incomplete.
The final settings config is fun but it has one design philosophy which players may come to really dislike, which is the solution of a good majority of numeric puzzles coming down to either "1847", "1963" or "2014" which are plot relevant dates. For this puzzle it's a bunch of wildly varied symbol sequences that you need to decipher into one of those three years.
This is usually fine since it comes with a caveat as to how you're meant to input it, but there's a set of doors that are locked with roman numeral pads and it's up to you to eventually realize that the character limit for each lockpad can correspond to any of the three dates, and this wasn't really signposted well since there's to my knowledge no actual hint or anything that tells you these doors are year coded.
There are some outliers, mainly symbols instead of numbers but ultimately it comes back to you inputting some representation of numbers.
Very rarely there's some perspective puzzling where the game expects you to mentally rotate an object(sometimes physically) in your mind
These puzzles aren't always hinted at. the game obviously starts you off really easy by having puzzle solutions be in a document you've just read, to telling you what document or what the solution is but having some form of trick as to how you're meant to input the code(for example there's a random group of movie posters next to four digit keypads, whose movie cassettes containing the four digit year of release are given to you later. Each movie poster is re-arranged in some fashion and asks you to mentally re-arrange the year of release in the same way. The poster may be mirrored, or split into four quarters and shuffled, or the half of one poster may be appended to the half of the other), to finally giving you just weird symbols and hoping you can correlate that solution to whatever puzzle you haven't solved yet. Usually the latter class of puzzle is extremely good but sometimes it falls into the trap of you having the correct answer but having some tiny discrepancy as to how the dev expects you to enter said puzzle solution(Caps sensitivity in bug report 2, the cemetery mausoleum
Some more vital/optional puzzles such as opening shortcut doors and document tubes that contain maps to the various floors of the hotel are straight up given to you in a big book, it's all just math puzzles like correlating architectural sketches to a total cost of a room, or little brain teasers. These are also really good.
Without spoiling too much there's also a really good final puzzle that reminds me a bit of TUNIC and it's 60+ input code you need for the (true) ending. It's this big super computer with three parts to its login, a username, a password and then a setting.
The username would be obvious after playing for a bit, but the keys are all weird symbols that you have to relate to actual alphabets via three separate puzzle "quest lines" that each give you a piece of the puzzle.
The password was a lot more obtuse but once it clicked it made me feel like I had a four digit IQ. the difficulty of it comes from the fact that it's all in one spot but unless you take your time to actually explore that spot the initial solution becomes incomplete.
The final settings config is fun but it has one design philosophy which players may come to really dislike, which is the solution of a good majority of numeric puzzles coming down to either "1847", "1963" or "2014" which are plot relevant dates. For this puzzle it's a bunch of wildly varied symbol sequences that you need to decipher into one of those three years.
This is usually fine since it comes with a caveat as to how you're meant to input it, but there's a set of doors that are locked with roman numeral pads and it's up to you to eventually realize that the character limit for each lockpad can correspond to any of the three dates, and this wasn't really signposted well since there's to my knowledge no actual hint or anything that tells you these doors are year coded.
Like I said the game isn't really perfect, to me this comes mainly in terms of some control and gameplay aspects.
- The music seems really good, but you don't hear any of it. There are phonograms that you need to interact with in specific rooms that play specific tracks, but they play the music in only those rooms which is fucking mindboggling. The music doesn't even echo into the neighbouring rooms, and when you open up your menu, the menu that contains every book and photo and note you've examined, or move to solve a puzzle, the music stops. WHY?!
- You very slowly walk everywhere and don't get a speed boost(caffine) until very later in the game, and caffine while an unlimited resource runs out fairly quickly.
- There are only two input buttons for the game, movement and "input/interact". the latter does everything, from opening the menu containing your inventory/mental notes/checklist to interacting with doors to inputting stuff in said doors to opening the doors(you need to keep moving in a direction until you reach whatever equivalent of a knob on whatever you're trying to open).
This has the unfortunate side effect of making some padlocks really clunky with their inputs, an alphanumeric lock may require you to scroll through the entire alphabet twice because you've accidentally went past the correct letter and there's no input to go back.
This also means constantly facing away from doors when trying to open your notes, and also needing to interact with a door and inputting an incorrect code(hear the movie trailer "bwaaaa" sound that indicates an incorrect answer") to stop solving the puzzle. - Lots of unskippable stuff that's also very repeatable. The beforementioned coffee animation is one of those(keep in mind every time you use it you need to open your inventory which has no way of being sorted and scroll to the coffee cup), the "quiz club brothers", the "interrogation room", just animations you've already seen before but each take about 10 seconds each to play out, the interrogation is fine since it's relatively uncommon but there are 26 quiz brothers and they come in extremely quick succession which makes it super fucking annoying, especially if you accidentally screwed up one of the solutions and haven't saved.
- They really liked the maze design they've made to the point where it's repeated twice(a third in an optional minigame) and you have to very slowly navigate either iteration, each one having it's own special prespective(and one that requires the maze to be completely shattered and jumbled prespective for you to progress in the other)
- Much like TUNIC's golden path, the supercomputer can get really annoying because it has so many inputs but no real indication as to where you could have screwed up. This is very critical due to the fact that the final set of puzzles have a couple of solutions that can be interpreted in multiple ways but only one actual solution.
- The last section with the defragmented memories is just meh.
Anyways the game is really gud if you're into esoteric puzzlers. Go for it and come back and call me an asshole for recommending something you didn't like or something.
