finally growing my laser eyes
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has been haunting me from the Switch HOME menu for over 2 years. I picked this game up back in 2024 when it launched and played for a total of 2 hours before admitting defeat and moving onto other games that year.
But that didn’t mean I wasn’t interested. I just hadn’t grown my laser eyes yet.
Upon my first few minutes in Hotel Letztes Jahr, I came across dozens of locked doors, an espresso machine I couldn’t use, and a telephone. About an hour or two later, I somehow ended up on the 2nd floor and out in the hotel’s courtyard before closing out the game.
A week goes by before I open up the game again and it was like opening up a stranger’s save file in any other game: I didn’t remember a goddamn thing I did up to that point or what I was supposed to do next.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a puzzle game that places you, the player, in the shoes of this chic mysterious woman who wears sunglasses at night and your goal is to step inside Hotel Letztes Jahr to figure out who this woman is, what the story is, the identity of the hotel’s guests, and what year it is.
The game is very upfront about what it will require from you to solve its many many puzzles and just asks you outright to play with a pen and paper. Yes, it’s that kind of game. And I love a good pen-and-paper game, so why did I bounce so hard off of Lorelei?
I was 24 when I first attempted this game and my frontal lobe might’ve just not been quite there yet. I was simply not in the right headspace and I don’t even know if my 24-year old self could’ve positioned his brain in a way that could’ve made sense of this game even if he stared at it long enough.
Since then, I’ve taken the time to play other games, watch more movies, and read more books. And I didn’t know it at the time, but learning to step away like that would be vital to my eventual completion of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.
Luckily, I’m not 24 anymore. I’m 26 now- I’ve completed MYST, watched Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, read some Paul Auster, and tackled House of Leaves, and so I feel like at least met the prerequisites to give Lorelei and the Laser Eyes another shot.
Within an hour of returning to Hotel Letztes Jahr, I already noticed myself chipping away at the endless hallways of locked doors, hidden passageways, and tucked-away safes much more easily. I don’t know what exactly shifted between 24 and 26 besides my frontal lobe fully developing, but this game is not as daunting as I initially made it out to be.
Unlike MYST and Riven, a lot of the puzzles in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes are self-contained to that specific door, lock, or room and there’s rarely a reason to run to the other side of the hotel to solve a puzzle (unless of course, you just obtained a key to a puzzle you’ve been stuck on for hours before).
Without spoiling anything, Lorelei gives you everything you need to solve its puzzles (even an in-game calculator so you’re not tempted to look up the answers on your phone). If you don’t have a solution to a puzzle yet, it mostly likely means you should probably go solve other puzzles in the hotel or drink some water and take time to look at something else whether it be a book, movie, painting, or just stare out the window.
A lot of the puzzles that stumped me in Lorelei were puzzles I thought way too hard about- especially the puzzle with the windows in Room [REDACTED]. But I think that’s why it’s important to step away from the game just long enough to give your (laser) eyes a break but not so long that you return to the game and forget everything you did.
At a certain point, I was flipping through my near-complete notebook, scribbling roman numerals, and shuffling between mazes I printed out, trying to wrap my head around one of these puzzles. My partner was sitting across from me, witnessing me stare at the puzzle on screen painfully long and asked me “are you even having fun?”
Yes… yes I was.
*I played this game on Switch and it was so nice to kick back with a joycon in one hand and a pen in the other because after all, this is a one-button game. After playing the entire Famicom Detective Club trilogy last year, I desperately missed having a good one-joycon-game and I think we need more of them.
After about a week of obsessing over Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I did start to feel my laser eyes growing. Puzzles that stumped me in my first hour I could solve after a second-long glance towards the end of my playthrough.
My partner witnessed me pull up a puzzle (I won’t say which one), but after looking at it for less than a few seconds, I said “Oh, it’s 74!”
She looked at me and asked “How the f*** do you get ‘74’ from that?!”
I think when you stare at the same puzzles for long enough and are forced to freshen up on your roman numerals (remembering certain years in roman numerals), then your brain will eventually have a chiropractic adjustment where you suddenly understand how these puzzles are arranged and you realize how to solve more of them. And if you don’t know how to solve a puzzle, the game at least gives you enough resources to teach you how to solve it rather than straight up telling you.
In Lorelei, solving a puzzle only leads to more puzzles.
You might be banging your head against one locked door for hours but when you eventually get the key or realize the combination, it oftentimes leads to an entire hall of more locked doors and more puzzles. And this might be controversial to some of those that have played this game already, but this is the reason I don’t think looking up a hint or two will ruin the experience for anyone.
There are SO many opportunities to have that “a-ha” eureka moment that I don’t think looking up a hint to one or two puzzles in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes will detract from the overall experience too much. Because again, unlike MYST, this game shuffles around its puzzles and solutions for every playthrough and so that means looking up the answers isn’t as simple as googling some other solution someone else got online and that also means replaying this game isn’t as simple as remembering all the answers and looking through your notebook.
But out of the one or two times I looked up a hint (alright, three times), I did feel like I missed out on an opportunity to look at a puzzle from a different perspective or at least calm my mind down to not overthink some of the visually-daunting-yet-simple puzzles. But again, there’s NO shortage of puzzles here and I did still leave with more than a few moments where I felt like pretty clever for figuring things out.
Speaking of which, I beat Lorelei and the Laser Eyes after about 25-30 hours and was not ready to move on. So I started a new save file and played through it again and rather than using 110% of my brain I was able to actually pay attention to the story and how the narrative is scattered across all the puzzles. It was interesting to go through it again and suddenly make sense of what exactly is going on here in Hotel Letztes Jahr and realize who these characters are and why they’re all here.
Anyway, after 2 playthroughs, I feel like I’m ready to move on from this wonderful game. I’m so glad I waited all this time to play it rather than write it off entirely or rely on a walkthrough to play it. Similar to how I felt about Flower Sun and Rain when I played it last year: if you have to rely on a walkthrough for the entire game, you are missing out on what the game is trying to teach you as the player and this is probably not the game for you (not in a gatekeep-y way, more like you deserve to play other games you find fun).
I feel like I can rest now. Till next time, take care and visit your local library.
