Counterpoint on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — Reading Through the Negative Reviews

Introduction

Komugi gave Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a 9.0/10 — an heir to Obra Dinn wrapped in Simogo's dreamlike aesthetic, a game she'd press on anyone who has forgotten how to play with pen and paper. I respect that review. But when I read near-perfect praise, my habit is fixed: I go and read the other side.

On Steam the game sits at Very Positive. Yet pull out only the negative reviews, sort them by helpfulness and by recency, and you find something startling: strangers who never spoke to each other lodging the same complaint in almost the same words. The controls. Getting lost. The monotony of locks. And the light. Four points Komugi's review did not spend a single line on. Today I face all four head-on.

What the Negative Reviews Claim

First, the controls. The most-upvoted negative reviews agree on one thing: the game funnels nearly everything through a single button. Opening your inventory, examining an object, turning the dials of a combination lock — the same input. There is no mouse support and no 'back' button to exit a menu. If you want to abandon a puzzle mid-way, your only option is to enter a wrong answer on purpose and let it reject you, several critics report. One spelled it out: inputting '9999' took roughly forty button presses.

Second, never knowing where a solution lives. One long negative review describes hitting the midpoint with fifty-plus puzzles and a hundred-plus documents and 'no clue which puzzles were actually solvable.' Is the answer in this room, in another room, or gated behind ten puzzles you haven't touched? Nothing, the reviewer says, tells you which.

Third, the monotony of the locks. Reviewers complain that too many puzzles reduce to 'find a date somewhere, type it into a lock,' that opening one yields no satisfaction — just another lock and more numbers. One invoked the harsh comparison of 'The Witness syndrome': beautiful to look at, but the puzzles might as well be printed on paper.

Fourth, accessibility. Several negative reviews report that, a few hours in, intense red strobing light appears frequently with no warning and no option to disable it. Another notes that in the dim noir palette the documents are blindingly white.

Examining the Claims

Start with the one-button controls. Simogo has said outright that the uniform input is a deliberate style, an homage to PS1-era survival horror. There is precedent for 'friction as expression': Resident Evil's fixed cameras and Silent Hill's heavy turns turned inconvenience into a tool of dread. The catch is that Lorelei is not a horror game but a cipher game that demands long stretches of heavy numeric entry. Inconvenience-as-style and inconvenience-as-labor must be measured on different scales.

What about never knowing where a solution lives? This touches the genre's nature. Escape rooms and adventure-cipher games have, historically, placed the very act of deciding 'what counts as a clue' at the center of play. Myst and Obra Dinn both start opaque. But the strong ones grant a sense of 'regions' that loosely fence off what is currently solvable — Outer Wilds' ship log is the purest such device. Lorelei draws criticism precisely because it deliberately thins that signposting. Defect, or design? I rule on that below.

On the locks and 'The Witness syndrome': the jibe that the puzzles 'might as well be on paper' does not quite land as an insult in puzzle design. Crosswords and sudoku work on paper and can still be masterpieces. The real issue is the count and the spacing of the locks. When identical procedures stack with no step of discovery between them, the brain stops feeling like it is 'solving' and starts feeling like it is 'typing.' This is not a sin unique to Lorelei; it is a structural risk of any game that pushes on cipher volume.

Where I Agree

On controls and accessibility, I side with the negative reviews. This is the clear blind spot in Komugi's review. She wrote 'for those who forgot how to play with pen and paper,' yet she does not spend one line on the friction that precedes the paper — the friction of merely exiting a menu, of merely entering an answer. Defending inconvenience-as-style is not the same as defending the labor of pressing a button dozens of times to enter a single solution. The absence of a 'back' button is not style; it is simply a missing piece — a fact underlined by the players who built a mod to add one.

The strobing-light issue is heavier still. A design that, hours in, throws frequent intense red flashes at you with no warning and no toggle has no artistic defense. Photosensitive-seizure risk is a safety matter that sits above any aesthetic argument, and 'it's the mood' does not pass here. That Komugi's review touches this point nowhere is, for a writer awarding a near-perfect score, a failure of due diligence.

And I partly agree on the 'spacing' of the locks. In the endgame there genuinely are stretches where identical procedures repeat and the step of discovery thins out. Komugi wrote that she 'filled two notebooks,' but she never separates how many of those pages were the joy of solving and how many were the chore of copying. The negative reviewers name the chore side precisely.

Where I Push Back

But on the core charge — that the puzzles are 'shallow' and yield 'no satisfaction' — I push back. Lorelei is not a mechanical puzzle game of the Baba Is You or Patrick's Parabox kind, where a handful of rules chain into deep lines of play. It is a detective-and-cipher work, and its source of satisfaction is different. It bets not on the local pleasure of 'where is the number for this lock?' but on the pleasure of making the whole building a single mystery — the stopped clock, the mirrored hall, the family names all converging on one truth. Demanding an 'aha' from every individual lock is like demanding a whodunit reveal on every page of a mystery novel.

On the unmarked location of solutions, I come down on the defense. As Komugi correctly noted, the game changes part of its solutions per session. That you cannot copy answers from a walkthrough video is an institutional guarantee that forces the player to judge 'what is a clue.' Thinning the visibility of regions is not laziness; it is a deliberate tilt that shifts the weight of observation and deduction onto the player. It belongs to the same lineage as Myst refusing to hand you a map — a classical but legitimate choice.

And the jibe that it 'might as well be on paper' I read, instead, as praise. Obra Dinn and the Golden Idol games were, in essence, logic puzzles that resolve on paper. Driving thought off the screen and onto the player's desk is the achievement of this lineage, not evidence of tedium. What is tedious is not the nature of the puzzles but the density tuning of the endgame. The two must not be conflated.

Closing — Who It's For, Who It Isn't

Here is my verdict. I agree with these negative reviews by half. The complaints about controls and accessibility are valid, and Komugi's 9.0 does not account for those deductions; on my own scorecard, that alone is worth a point off. But I do not agree with the core charge that 'the puzzles are shallow.' That is a misreading of the genre. Lorelei is not a mechanical puzzle game; it is correctly built as a deductive cipher-drama that treats an entire building as one mystery.

So the buying call comes out like this. Three groups should pass. First, anyone seeking the 'depth of rules' of Baba Is You or Parabox — what you want is not here. Second, anyone who loses focus without crisp, comfortable controls — the one-button friction never goes away. Third, and most clearly, anyone who is photosensitive — there is unwarned red strobing, and on safety grounds I cannot recommend it. There is no room for compromise on that point.

Conversely, I strongly recommend it to anyone willing to set pen and paper beside them and sink whole tens of hours into a stopped clock and a hall of mirrors — anyone who can bet not on the satisfaction of a single lock but on the sensation of an entire hotel folding into one truth. For that person this is one of the few special experiences a year affords. One concrete piece of advice: play the first hour, and if the controls are physically intolerable, refund without hesitation. Komugi's review ended on 'remember pen and paper.' My more practical conclusion is this — find out in that first hour whether your fingers and your eyes can take it, before you buy.