Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

First Impressions

A monochrome hotel summons me. Stopped clocks. Mirrored corridors. Nobody is there, but the feeling of being watched never leaves.

Numbers in the lobby, dates inside paintings, codes on doors — everything goes into my notebook as a cipher. Simogo, the studio behind Sayonara Wild Hearts, has changed posture completely.

Out in the courtyard there's a theater and a maze with no clear builder. The air stays monochrome; only sometimes does red flicker. Every time it did, my hands stopped.

Putting the Mechanics into Words

More than 150 independent puzzles scatter through one building: Roman numerals, Greek letters, astrology, mazes, sequences, math, geometry. The variety is huge yet the cipher logic stays consistent.

Solving one puzzle is often the key to another. The whole building functions as a single layered cipher. Without notes you'll lose yourself.

The in-game memo system is deliberately minimal. Screenshots, paper notebook — these are not optional. The design enforces 'play with a real notebook' as a constitutional rule.

What Makes It Great

Dense ciphers requiring real-world knowledge are placed inside a dreamlike atmosphere. Where Obra Dinn stacks material evidence, Lorelei asks 'how do you read this written number.'

The still photographs of empty rooms, the chairs with a presence despite no occupants, the recurring melodic motif. Simogo's aesthetic stops just short of overwhelming the act of solving.

And the game doesn't measure your time. You can spend a month a few minutes at a time and the game never blames you. I played it as a bedtime ritual for two months.

Design Craft

Solutions to some puzzles vary per session. Even if you watch a walkthrough, your answer differs. The design quietly protects the 'play with paper' assumption.

The UI ethic is monastic. Hints, progress bars, completion percentages are all sparse. Obra Dinn used the 'Chapters' panel to make progress visible; Lorelei does the opposite. Decide what you've seen, decide what you haven't.

If I were tackling this I doubt I could level 150 puzzles to this evenness. Simogo seems to have prioritized 'density per location' over flat difficulty, and trusted the structure to absorb the variance.

The Texture of Difficulty

Eighteen hours, two full notebooks. The late-game number puzzles cross-reference clues on different floors of the hotel. Where players stall will be completely individual.

Math-strong players surge through the sequences; word-strong players surge through the alphabet puzzles. I was neither, so I stalled evenly. But every player has somewhere to advance, which is the design holding together.

Closing

It sits in Obra Dinn's lineage with Simogo's dream aesthetic wrapped around it. For anyone who has forgotten how to play with paper and pen, this is the strongest possible reminder. The next door past Myst.

The thing I most want to imitate is the consistency of 'this game requires a desk.' Deliberately removing in-game conveniences to extend play outside the screen. There may be more left there for digital games than we realize.