Slowly unraveling the dense puzzle box of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes makes for one of the best adventure game experiences in recent years. The mysterious, mostly-abandoned hotel it's based in is presented in a bold style of monochrome with splashes of red, an atmospheric setting that feels increasingly elaborate and dangerous as you progress through the game. Figuring out what's going on in the interesting story through notes, letters, strange conversations, and other clues in the environment becomes a puzzle in and of itself—both figuratively and literally. All in all, it's a remarkably satisfying, complete, engaging, and well-realized experience.
Puzzles here are a range of things. Very early on, you'll already see a ton of locks, dials, and other contraptions which are mostly self-contained logic puzzles. The deeper in you get, more involved puzzles and problems (whose nature I won't spoil) start coming up that build on knowledge you've gained in other areas, get increasingly layered and difficult to solve, and feed directly into each other in some instances that really wowed me. Collectively it all reminded me a lot of that great feeling of consistent progress through Resident Evil's classic Spencer Mansion, for example, but blown up to a larger level of complexity and creativity.
With all the information to collect here, the game is good about having recognizable reused themes and concepts across its different puzzles. Some of these repeated patterns are easy to spot, but get interesting twists that will definitely make you stop and think for a minute. Before long, you can recognize certain things as important information or intuit what the game wants from you without it explicitly telling you. It wasn't always immediate, but I could usually leave and go do something else and find that it clicked quickly later on. It's also good at clarity and recognizability on the macro scale, as despite how dense and large the hotel is, the rooms and overall layout were distinctive and memorable enough that I could find my away around before I even found each floor's map.
Some of the best moments come out of finally breaking through something first seen forever ago, then suddenly being presented with like 4 new things to suddenly go use to go pull on 4 other threads from earlier. It feels so close to being overwhelming, but somehow I just just always knew something productive that I could go do, and it felt so good continuously flowing between short- and long-term objectives. It's really cool how the storytelling also fits in this feeling so well, vague in the right ways while still being clear and interesting enough that there's something to grab onto and pull you forward.
Unfortunately, the game has a bit of an Achilles heel in its awkward UI/UX. The control scheme is too basic, only using 4-directional movement and one single context-aware action button. They were going for accessibility, but for most players, forcing all actions onto one button ends up being awkward in menus, puzzles, and exploration. The game could also really use some kind of way to pin information to the screen, or search, or contextually highlight relevant stuff, or at least remember where the cursor was, or you know... let you use the mouse or... hopefully you get the point. I was pretty often just baffled at how the oversimplification of inputs and lack of quality of life features had made things unintuitive and cumbersome.
In any case, those issues can only detract so much from a game that is otherwise super well-designed, enjoyable, and distinctive. It is seriously difficult to put down, and before you know it, you'll have pages of notes that look to anyone else like absolute gibberish. But the internal logic of the game is so nicely set up that no matter how much stuff they introduce, it just all makes sense if you pay attention, and I am really impressed at how deep this thing goes while remaining totally solvable and fun.
