Backlog Bingo 2025: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

So, first off, the fact that this is made by the Sayonara Wild Hearts devs is absolutely wild to me. (It is also absolutely nothing like that game in basically any way.)

This game is very popular with the M̵̛̙̲̀e̸̙͉͆̏ť̸̝̻r̸͍̲͑ò̶̟͇͜ḯ̸̡̙̝̈d̴̝̜̏̒͝b̴̨͍͋̊͝r̴̰͇͗ȧ̵̬͋͛į̶̏̿̀n̵̜̪̄i̵̧̨̋̅ͅạ̵̭̍ crowd, but it isn't really a very apt genre comparison, I think. (I mean, the primary reason I dislike the Forbidden Genre as a label is that I don't think anyone has come even close to agreeing on what it means.) It's much more reasonable to compare this to other strict puzzle games: the puzzles are mechanically the same every time, but their answers will differ, so you're still having to actually play the game instead of being able to skip a bunch of knowledge gates immediately. (It's very much like the Myst and Riven remakes in that way.) Not every puzzle works this way, but if you, for some reason, replayed it, you'd still have to re-solve most of the puzzles.

Lorelei is a game with a search space that expands immensely almost immediately, and then slowly contracts and re-expands until you're left with exactly one thing you can do (and doing that thing rolls credits). But you can absolutely expect to spend multiple hours just sitting on information that you aren't ready to use yet: roughly the first or second "major" thing I did resulted in me having 1/3 of the game's final puzzle solution in hand, but I not only didn't know that, I didn't really have any guesses on what I was learning actually meant. And a lot of the game goes like this: almost every single interactable object has something important in it, but you'll pick up a book titled "Moon Phases of 1847" or whatever and store away "well this is probably going to be useful eventually" a lot. This ultimately left me feeling like I was never quite sure when something would be useful: sometimes you find a thing that explains the puzzle in the same room, and sometimes you find a thing that's one-quarter of a puzzle eight hours from now, and telling the difference between these can be occasionally frustrating. (No points for the puzzle that gave me three numbers that I tried putting into half of the combination locks in the game before realizing that I was supposed to turn those numbers upside down and try to read them as the letters that they looked like in that particular font. I mean, okay, some points for that, it's neat, and, lol, lmao.)

Small complaints aside, Lorelei is largely a masterclass in non-linear puzzle design if you're into that. It does, I think, fall pretty flat for me in departments that aren't the actual puzzles, particularly in two ways.

One of the very first screens you see contains a few cryptic sentences as part of the tutorial, like "the girl in the owl mask never lies" and "if a revolver is present, the game might be over": that last one alludes to what I think is Lorelei's only really dubious mechanic, the fact that a couple of classes of NPC will shoot and kill you (resulting in a hard game over, load your last save) if you get their questions wrong. Almost all of these encounters are mandatory, but also random, and losing five or ten minutes of gameplay because you don't know what counts as an "arm" on a candelabra is basically always going to feel bad. I don't really know what it's incentivizing, either: one such puzzle requires as an answer four Greek letters in the right order; the likelihood of guessing that cold is very small, so the fact that you get shot if you get the answer wrong doesn't actually dissuade that many people from guessing, I think? They're just going to say "oh I don't know how to solve this puzzle yet" and leave. It just feels a bit time-wasting.

Also, this game controls entirely with a d-pad and a button. Any button. One button does things in this game, which means that things that would have very obvious shortcuts in other games like "open my map" or "check my inventory" require multiple button presses when they could very easily require one. (This also means that "open the menu" is "press the button that interacts with things when you aren't in range of an interactable thing"; I lost count of how many times I accidentally opened the menu and how many times I tried to open the menu and read a random book instead very very early.) Again, I don't know why this decision was made: it seems like it's almost a strict downside as an interface. (Maybe they're going to do a mobile port a la Sayonara Wild Hearts and it will need to have everything work via "bap phone" inputs, but that doesn't really keep it from feeling bad on a Steam Deck.)

I loved Lorelei's puzzles when the game would get out of the way. If you can deal with some interface jank and mechanical jank (and also if you like your puzzles very math heavy: at least some are straight up "do you know what exponents are" or similar) there's a ton to love here. It's clearly a labor of love, I liked it enough to play through a fairly difficult puzzle game in under a week, and I just wish it were a liiiiiittle different in a small handful of ways? It was so close to perfection.