Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Review: A Puzzle Game Like No Other

is many things. It's the new title from Simogo and Annapurna Interactive, the developer and publisher behind the neon rhythm action game. It's 1847 and 1963 and 2014. It's the tale of Lorelei and Renzo, and Renate and Lorenzo, and maybe even Lorentz and Resnik. It's a puzzle box of glancing hints and shuffled solutions. It's virtually designed to be hit with accusations of pretension. It can't, at any rate, be accused of sticking to convention.

The story of starts in a lot of different places, depending on the angle, but the game starts with a woman outside a car. She can open it, but only after an intertitle informs her that it's locked and an inventory with a car key and tampons pops up to solve the problem. Like everything else in the game, this screen can be navigated with any analog stick or D-pad, and items can be selected with any button. Despite being far more complex than, controls like it's on Atari.

The simplified control scheme can take a bit of getting used to, particularly because hitting a button when standing slightly too far from an object opens a menu instead. This menu, referred to as Introspection, becomes both a friend and a source of frustration. Inside it is an ever-growing archive of almost every piece of information that the woman can encounter, and shuffling through these maps, letters, and even software errors is the key to solving many puzzles.

Story elements reveal themselves in a similar fashion, and although it's best to leave the whole thing unspoiled, there's only so much in that could truly be spoiled. Every piece of lore paints part of a picture, but it's not all happening on one canvas. Several different narratives overlap and intersect in ways that are frequently illuminating, if never quite right. Although shaping this into some sort of truth is tantalizing, that ultimate goal should never get in the way of appreciating the fragments on their own.

When things are going smoothly, unlocking new corners of has an intoxicating