SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-02

Soundtrack: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — piano cutting through hotel dark

Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, Jonathan Eng

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #piano #ambient #simogo

Introduction — a single piano left in a late-night lobby

Step into a hotel where black-and-white photographs blend with low-resolution 3D, and the first thing to reach your ear is a single piano note dragging a long reverb tail. In this Simogo observation puzzle covered by our review, the music by Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, and Jonathan Eng begins with piano. The tempo is roughly too slow to measure, with ample silence left between one chord and the next. A new note is placed gently before the previous one's resonance fully dies — and that 'placing' sounds the loneliness of this hotel night exactly as it is.

The official soundtrack was released on May 30, 2024: 37 tracks, about 1 hour 12 minutes. Olsén composed and arranged most of it, Linnea Olsson joined with cello, vocals, bass, and co-writing, and Jonathan Eng wrote guitar-led songs like 'Laser Eyes' and 'Radio Waves.' Not chiptune, not orchestra — the decision to put piano at the center is what sets the feel of this work.

Piano at the center — Debussy, Satie, and Twin Peaks

This is the single most worth-taking point in this score. According to Simogo's production notes and developer interviews, centering the piano was decided fairly early in development, and the team often referenced Debussy and Satie while searching for the direction. Of course — that 'round-cornered dissonance,' chords that seem about to resolve but don't, resonance left hanging, is the family tree of Impressionism and Erik Satie. Long-held pedal, motion that avoids a regular beat. The manner of music that never rushes the listener comes from here.

Olsén also cites David Lynch's Twin Peaks — surreal, meaningful art that changed the television landscape, which is how he tied it to this game; in fact the track 'Interrogation' hides a nod to the Twin Peaks theme. Placing it as an 'atmosphere' rather than a quotation is also the source of the déjà vu drifting through the whole hotel. Olsén says he tried everything in the process — 8-bit and 16-bit game styles, degraded VHS-like noise, minimal techno and trip-hop — and I read the final result as sinking the sediment of those experiments into the clear vessel of the piano.

A hidden link with the experience — photo and 3D, acoustic and digital

In his production notes Olsén writes that most songs are 'a mix of my digital elements and Linnea's vocals, cello, and bass.' And that this contrast of acoustic and digital mirrors, like a reflection, the game's visuals where analog photographs coexist with 3D spaces. This can't be overlooked. The layers of timbre are stacked by exactly the same logic as the layers of image. The grain of a live cello, the smoothness of a synth. A coarse-grained black-and-white photo, a slick polyhedral 3D. With ear and eye, you experience the same 'two layers.'

The sound design is continuous with this. Olsén first pushed everything toward 'low quality, as if played from an old cassette,' but in the end made the hotel's ambience more realistic and reserved the unreal, floating sounds for otherworldly places like the maze and the quiz club. It's a design where the player can unconsciously tell 'is this a room in the real hotel, or the puzzle world inside?' from sonic texture alone. In this puzzle of observation and deduction, sound is not mere accompaniment but a small piece of evidence announcing the true nature of a space.

Solving tempo and song structure — silence frees a seat for thought

The solving feel of this game is, above all, long stretches of standing still and staring. You take notes, assemble PIN codes, shuttle between rooms. It's not a running puzzle but a brooding one. So if the music were briskly ticking out a beat, the desk of your thinking would get cluttered. The piano and Satie-like spacing Olsén chose do the opposite. By leaving silence between notes, the music keeps a seat open for the player's thought to sit in. Sounding yet not intruding — I think this is a third answer, different from silence and different from a continuous loop.

The structural correspondence is beautiful too. In this puzzle one clue becomes the key to another, and the whole hotel folds into a single great mechanism. The music likewise sets down many short motifs and quietly reunites you with them in later tracks. The instant a player slaps their knee — 'ah, that earlier thing pays off' — rides the same pleasure as the instant the ear recalls 'this melody, somewhere before.' The discovery of a solution and the return of a theme are designed at the same tempo. It's the same breath as the beat I leave after refilling my black coffee.

Tracks to hear — three scooped from the night hotel

Start with the official source end to end: all tracks are on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (YouTube Music, official album) ↗. To confirm the piano-centered direction, it's good to lead with 'Library' and 'Titles,' where the Debussy/Satie lineage comes through most plainly.

Embedded below is 'Radio Waves.' It's the track Olsén named in his production notes as carrying 'traces of sampling our own songs using piano bits,' and the melting-together of digital and acoustic is clearest here. The official audio is credited to Jonathan Eng, Daniel Olsén and others, released by the label Simogo AB.

One more — please hear the game's face, the theme song 'Laser Eyes (ft. Andromeda) ↗.' Written by Jonathan Eng, this song is conspicuously glamorous within a piano-grounded score, singing of the 'something' beyond the hotel's mysteries. When it arrives after the quiet piano pieces, the night brightens a notch.

Closing — if I were to steal, the idea of matching layers to the image

If I were composing, this is what I'd steal: the idea of stacking layers of timbre by the 'same logic' as layers of image and worldview. Use the contrast of acoustic and digital not merely because it sounds cool but as a mirror of the screen's two-layer structure. You can test it in a DAW — prepare a stem of live instruments and a stem of synth, and deliberately map their contrast to the two-sidedness of the story. Once sound starts doubling as an explainer of the world, a song is promoted from accompaniment to evidence.

For relistening, it suits the night, at your desk, stopped while trying to solve something. Confirm that feel of silence freeing a seat for thought. It's music for 'time spent stopped,' the exact opposite of the chiptune that supported trial and error in the Baba Is You piece. Within the same puzzle genre, when the solving feel differs, the placing of sound flips inside out — I'd be glad if you read them in sequence for that pleasure.