CHENNAI: Is solving the Sunday morning cryptic crossword getting a little too easy for you? Of course it is. That’s a puzzle for newbs. You are more intense than that. You crave something with a little more complexity, don’t you? You want the kind of puzzle that changes its rules everyday. And maybe they don’t even tell you that they’ve changed up the rules.
You want to wake up every morning to pin up the answers on a giant conspiracy board trying to make sense of it all. You can’t prove anything just yet, but you know that there’s a pattern hidden here somewhere. Does this sound insane to you? If yes, then look away. This isn’t for you. Are you still here? Good. Let me tell you about “Lorelei and the Laser Eyes”.
The game begins on a dark night. You, the heroine, park your vehicle outside a very gloomy old hotel. You have accepted an invitation to meet an acquaintance here.
But they don’t seem to be here. In fact, the hotel seems empty. So, what do you do if you have a night alone at a large hotel? Explore it, of course. Something terrible has happened here. That much you can tell. But what? Does it have anything to do with the names scribbled on the walls? Renzo.
Lorenzo. Renate. Lorelei. Does it have anything to with the mysterious man with face of a maze that hovers around you? This, dear reader, was all I knew two hours into playing “Lorelei and the Laser Eyes”. With 80 rooms in the mansion, but only 4 open as of yet, it’s difficult to figure out what needs to be done to unlock the rest. Clues are scattered throughout all the currently accessible areas of the hotel. But I hardly know where they might be useful. So I write every single thing down. Dates, symbols, names. And then it all starts to make sense.
A pattern emerges. For example, very early in the game, I found some important looking receipts from the hotel architects. It was a confusing mess of pages with tricky calculations. I also noticed that every floor of the hotel had a lock box with similar symbology to the architect receipts. I clocked the pattern.
As it turned out, unlocking the boxes with the clues I had from the receipts gave me access to the hotel’s construction plans! This was super helpful to have in the first couple of hours. It gave me a sense of the scale of the game itself: How many rooms remain unlocked? How far was I from solving the mystery? While I love the puzzles, the game’s greatest achievement is in making sure I document everything and forget nothing.
I wrote down the questions that I had, the clues that I found, and the items that remained unsolved. At any point, I’d have a sudden “Aha!” moment, where I connect clue to puzzle, and puzzle to solution.
There were moments where flurry of connections were made, and multiple rooms unlocked in quick succession – there’s nothing quite as satisfying as it. There’s a lot of pattern recognition puzzles within the game, and through these, I ended up refamiliarizing myself with roman numerals and the Greek alphabet! I thought I’d seen the last of that with my statistics class from years ago.
“Lorelei and the Laser Eyes” is one of the best mystery games I’ve played – and has rightfully been nominated for the “Game Awards” this year for the Best Independent Gamecategory. It’s currently available Windows and the Nintendo Switch and will be available on the PlayStation later this month. It’s worth a try if you love solving puzzles.