I started playing puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes shortly after its release back in May, and almost immediately realized it would be much better with a buddy. And it was: it was useful to have a friend to talk over puzzles with, and cool to get to introduce a non-gaming friend to a game. And then it took us six months to actually finish it, because we are both adults with lives.
My friend and I got together infrequently for play sessions. Sometimes our schedules just couldn’t line up; other times, we’d meet up intending to play but then get distracted catching up on our lives until it got too late. (The main lesson this experience taught us was that we need to hang out more.) When we did play, we had a lot of fun. We both appreciated the game’s logic: how we knew we usually had the tools to solve a puzzle in front of us, and how the game generally makes it clear where to look for which puzzle’s clues. In puzzles that involved navigation, it was helpful to have one person look at a photo of a map or of the clues on their phone while the other steered our character.
(Spoilers for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes follow.)
In a lot of ways, Lorelei was a great game to play with someone who doesn’t play games much, given its pared-down controls and emphasis on puzzles rather than technical gaming skills. But it was still sometimes a challenge: your character doesn’t always steer so well, and my friend especially had trouble navigating the confusing perspective of the hotel’s backyard. The bug report puzzles gave us both a bit of trouble: while I haven’t played a lot of older games, I understood what these areas were referencing, but my friend got frustrated with the clunky inverted controls.
I think our biggest mistake was how long we went between playing, which made it easy to forget what we were doing or what task we'd left off in the middle of. This was particularly a problem this weekend, when we had nothing left but logging into the supercomputer to end the game. We had a general sense of which pieces we needed, but we'd forgotten precisely what to do with them. Eventually, we relented and looked up a guide, only to realize with despair that we would have to go back to the mazes, parts of the game we were totally over. We had to wrack our brains to remember where to find the maze and how to get to its center again, and it definitely made the end of the game feel a little draggy.
Speaking of guides, we didn’t use them much, but we did reference them on occasion when we were totally stumped. We had a big debate about it every time before we did it, and we tried our best not to accidentally read ahead. I’ll admit guides were helpful when the solution to a puzzle involved a lot of trekking around, though we did feel a bit disappointed in ourselves when we did it.
Our running joke with the game was that the reward for every puzzle was going to be another puzzle, and this proved true once we finally got into the supercomputer. I don’t think either of us loved the end, though this might also have been a consequence of how long we went between playing. A lot of the game’s plot was a bit hazy in our memories, and my friend especially was annoyed with one last bit of clunky navigation. But we felt good about finally finishing the game, even if we'd long lost the thread on who was who and why it mattered. And while I can't speak for my friend, I at least had a lot of fun looking up other players' interpretations of the story now that I'd finally seen its conclusion.
We didn’t 100% the game, which we both feel OK with. There’s an entire map we seem to be missing, even though I can’t find any indication that there’s an area we missed, and some memories we didn’t unlock. While neither of us is motivated to poke around the post-credits game given how bad we've been with our schedules, we’ll see if I can stick to my contentment with where we ended up when I’m alone with my PC.
I promised to introduce my friend to Return of the Obra Dinn next, another puzzle game everyone I know loved but which I kind of bounced off all by myself. I have it on my Switch, which means we can play it on my friend’s TV, which means we can sit on her couch instead of my sad PC setup where one of us had to sit on the stepstool that functions as my apartment's only other chair.
So yeah: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was a very good game that took us way too long to beat! Games with friends are fun! I can finally talk about it with everyone, long after everyone else is done with it! Come remember a game you surely beat ages ago and talk to me about it!
