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.
To speak too much about the game’s story would betray its intent, but know that while initially, the plot seems amorphous, it is all leading to something, I promise. Disparate news articles, books about lunar cycles, typed monologues about the nature and purpose of art, and incomplete film scripts all paint emotion about what happened in this hotel/mansion, but its final moments surprised me at how sharply it pulled everything into focus. What begins as effective but seemingly abstract tone-setting poems all make sense in the final moments, and I was impressed by the satisfying slow burn of the narrative.