This essay discusses lots of parts of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, from its beginning to its end and from what is on the screen to what is in the mind.
It becomes clear pretty early on in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes that you might not be Lorelei, and that this might not be the real world but the maze you’ve been reading about and that Lorelei has been hired to build. It’s meta, but not precious – it makes the jumps between different kinds of adventure game cohere. Her memories leading up to her arrival at the hotel are 2D point-and-click games. You jump into “prototypes” of the maze: a library, a set of halls, a forest. Fixed camera angles, tank controls, and an animation of a door opening when you go between rooms. You find the bug reports for these prototypes and they tell you how to glitch them out to get more information for other puzzles. Finding multiple prototypes before any of the bug reports, though, had me thinking I needed to perform as QA and try and trigger the bugs without knowing what they were. A thrilling mistake – stumbling into a bug and having the prototype crash, misdirecting myself into over-thinking what was going on.
The game’s required puzzles have clear instructions somewhere – though sometimes that clarity comes in hindsight. There are patterns – symbols on doors and their keys match, puzzle aesthetics tell you the same process can solve different ones. Being about memory and history means that things repeat across puzzles – there may be ten thousand possible four-digit combinations, but for Lorelei they are limited to years of births and deaths and important events. Motifs repeat the way they do in memory, in obsession, in art. You will eventually have everything you need in Lorelei’s photographic memory to solve the puzzles. If you can’t find it in her memory, then you’re probably not supposed to solve it yet.
Optional shortcuts are unlocked by solving number puzzles in an in-game puzzle book. The game confirms in its manual that these are optional. Lorelei’s memory is not much help here, and I definitely used algebra at least once. But these are also the only puzzles in the game that can be solved through trial-and-error. Every shortcut is locked by a dial with ticks from 0 to 100. Select the right number and the door opens. Select the wrong number, and it doesn’t. The dial stays where you put it, though, so if you want to go through the five-or-six-second-cycle of “interact with door, be told it’s locked, move the dial by one, try to open the door, watch animation, return to Lorelei”, it is conceivably possible. Tedious, though. But if you can narrow it down to a chunk of the dial, then the trial-and-error becomes faster than banging your head against the puzzle until it makes sense. And then, when you have the answer, you can figure out what you needed to be figuring out.
Solving in this game is an act of translation – for most puzzles, you’ll find a lock with a conspicuous clue nearby. It’s Lorelei’s memories, her experiences, which allow you to translate the clue into the solution. The things Lorelei remembers give you clues to her character. And translation happens at a character level. Roman numerals write numbers using letters – the game plays with this, as well as with the visual relationship between Arabic numerals and letters. Are they acting as numbers? Letters? A series of lines to be counted or inverted?
There’s lots of thinking laterally, or possibly unhingedly – trying to turn things into patterns that can plausibly transformed into an answer. Conspiracy. Mazes within mazes within mazes, memories that overlap. Some of those nested mazes are more literal than others- those prototype versions of Lorelei’s project – recreating these bug reports gives you more information that you’ll eventually be able to contextualize to open yet another door.
These prototypes are lower-resolution than the version of Lorelei’s project you’re playing, and the controls are out-of-date as well. You’ve got to go back to tank controls. Pushing UP on your thumbstick moves Lorelei in the direction she is facing, not “forward” in relation to the current camera angle. There’s some time for adaptation when you move between these two worlds, when your hands and brain haven’t caught up to the movement changes. Your hands have to adjust to their changing role of translator between what you want Lorelei to do on the screen and what she does on the screen. It’s a very pleasing little bit of brain itchiness, that adjustment.
Difficulty is a weird thing. Apologies to the social model of disability here for any misapplication of its approach, but difficulty’s not so much inherent in a game as it is in the relationship between the game and the player. Most of the puzzles in Lorelei didn’t feel difficult to me, because they lined up with ways of thinking I am used to from coding, from playing games, from solving puzzles. I know how to look for information in different spaces and menus in a video game; I know how to do algebra, to solve for X and to find patterns in numbers in order to figure out the algorithm that will let me fill in the blanks. And where I don’t have the necessary knowledge, like say knowing the Greek alphabet or being able to parse Roman numerals without my eyes going crossed, Lorelei’s photographic memory has my back.
Ah, but arrogance and certainty are undermined by misdirections in narrative and space and puzzle and in my own mistakes. My certainty that I didn’t have enough information to unlock document tubes, the result of overthinking the process and missing clues, meant I spent a large portion of the game mapless. Assuming I knew another puzzle’s answer, I didn’t fully read the instructions and spent several minutes frustrated that the clearly-right answer wasn’t working.
Like the way film projection worked by messing with our visual processing system, making flickering gaps into motion, redacted documents in the hotel give you the framework to convince yourself you know what’s happened. But you’re still just filling in blanks. Trying to piece together a story that travels between the supernatural and the supertechnological – or, rather, between the supertechnological model of the supernatural and the supertechnological.
Art and life and history and memory and time get tangled – things happen in art before they happen in life, then happen again in art. Art that lies, art that covers up, that weaves together fragmented memories or disk drives. Art that is both more and less than Lorelei’s life.
I thought I knew that Lorelei wasn’t safe – she was in an isolated building with a man who may have been very dangerous. But her story was being simulated here, so maybe she makes it out alive.
But if Lorelei isn’t in danger, there are times when your progress is – the interrogation sequences, when misremembering can lead to a game over (and, as the game tells you in both its instruction manual and through one of its ghosts, that means whatever is unsaved is gone).
I got stuck twice. The first time, I missed an interactable object in the world. The second time, I was at 90% completion and couldn’t figure out which of the four or five things I had left to do was the Next Right Thing. I found a forum post where the person was in the same spot, and a single reply saying which was the next thing to do was all I needed. Walked back to that puzzle and the solution jumped out at me as soon as I knew I wasn’t missing anything for it. Looking at the Lorelei notebook screenshots after finishing the game, I am wondering if the way it structures your notetaking would have helped me frame the puzzles more quickly in my mind the way I needed to in order to solve them.
The game’s most explicit truths come in the form of questions and answers – questions where the wrong answer will get you a game over, or prevent you from moving on through the final area.
There are interrogation scenes where you know the interrogator is going to ask you a question, and you’re placed in a frozen scene and allowed to walk around, but you have no control of the camera. Memory is partially, but never fully, under our command.
Since you don’t know on which question your interrogator hangs your life, wandering through these frozen scenes becomes hyper-focused moments of neurosis – everything becomes important and must be fixed in the brain. But if you think with your technology, you can augment your unreliable memory. Taking a cue from the game’s information-hoard being called “Photographic Memory”, I took so many screenshots during these sections, smashing the button as I walked and the camera moved.
It worked.
Later, whenever you’re questioned at gunpoint, you will have the opportunity to walk away, check your memories and your notes. You’re approaching the truth on your own terms. It’s no longer chasing you through a mansion, locking you in an interrogation room, pointing a gun at you. Now, these people with guns stand in the maze. They ask you one question.
It is important, I think, that the game gives you these quizzes, and that they often come with the threat of violence toward Lorelei and the threat of progress-loss to the player. Moving toward the truth can feel threatening – especially if it’s a truth that’s been willfully obscured. The final questions aren’t threatening. They’re very straightforward and block your path, but they’re no longer men with guns. They’re just questions, and you answer them, truthfully, and the obstacles disappear.
If the questions are true, then they split reality and fiction more cleanly in two than the rest of the experience does – they lock the game into a single-meaning puzzle, one solution. It’s necessary for the journey to feel complete. Without something concrete, you can reconfigure things forever. Then you just walk right out, and know that you can remember what had happened without having to relive it.
Because you those questions were definitely objectively true, right? They weren’t just there as a way to finally process everything, right?
I shouldn’t go back in. Right?