Simogo makes games that feel like they shouldn’t exist. The Swedish studio behind Device 6 and Sayonara Wild Hearts has built a reputation for experiences that defy easy categorization, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes might be their most uncompromising work yet. Set in a baroque European hotel, the game presents you with locked doors, coded messages, layered puzzles, and a narrative that weaves between timelines, mediums, and levels of reality. You will need a notebook. You will need patience. And if you have both, you’ll find one of the most rewarding puzzle experiences available on any platform.
The community around this game is passionate and specific. Players who connected with it describe the experience in almost reverential terms. Players who bounced off it hit the same wall: the game refuses to meet you halfway. There is no hint system. There are no difficulty options. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes trusts you completely, and that trust is either liberating or maddening.
A Puzzle Box That Contains Puzzle Boxes
The puzzle design in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes operates on a level that most games never attempt. Every room in the hotel can contain a puzzle, and those puzzles range from mathematical codes to spatial reasoning to linguistic decryption to logic chains that span multiple rooms and require information gathered hours earlier. The variety is staggering. You might solve a maze, decode a cipher, reconstruct a film reel, and crack a numerical sequence all within a single floor of the hotel. Nothing repeats, and nothing feels like filler.
What elevates the puzzles beyond mere difficulty is their integration into the world. Each puzzle exists for a reason within the hotel’s fiction. Door codes relate to dates or events in the narrative. Locked containers hold items that connect to other puzzles thematically, not just mechanically. The game creates a web of interconnected mysteries where solving one puzzle sheds light on three others you’d been stuck on. That cascading effect, where a breakthrough in one area triggers a chain of realizations, is the game’s signature feeling.
The presentation is striking and deliberate. Nearly everything is rendered in black, white, and red, creating a stark visual identity that reinforces the game’s themes of memory, perception, and artistic obsession. The fixed camera perspective shifts between classic adventure game angles and more experimental framings that play with your spatial understanding of the hotel. The minimalist soundtrack creates an atmosphere of focused concentration that matches the gameplay perfectly.
Narrative ambition matches the puzzle design’s reach. The story operates across multiple layers: a present-day mystery, a historical drama, a film within the game, and a metanarrative about creation and interpretation. These layers fold into each other in ways that are initially confusing and eventually brilliant. The game doesn’t separate story from puzzles. Understanding the narrative IS a puzzle, and the final hours deliver revelations that recontextualize everything you’ve done.
The Price of Uncompromising Design
Accessibility is essentially nonexistent, and that’s a deliberate choice with real consequences. There is no hint system, no journal that tracks clues for you, and no way to simplify puzzles. If you get stuck, your options are to keep examining the environment or to step away and think. Some puzzles require mathematical aptitude that not all players possess. Others demand spatial reasoning that can be outright exclusionary. The game’s refusal to compromise is admirable in principle but means a significant portion of interested players will hit walls they can’t overcome without external help.
The note-taking requirement is not optional. Players need physical paper or a note-taking app running alongside the game. Codes, dates, symbols, and spatial information accumulate over the runtime, and the game expects you to track all of it yourself. For some, this analog requirement enhances the experience. For others, it transforms a puzzle game into homework.
Pacing can stall completely when you’re stuck. Because the game doesn’t guide you toward solvable puzzles, it’s possible to spend extended periods wandering the hotel without making progress. The interconnected puzzle design means that being stuck on one problem can block several paths simultaneously. These moments of total impasse, where you have no idea what to do next, are part of the design philosophy. They’re also the moments when players are most likely to quit.
The narrative’s complexity occasionally works against it. Multiple timelines, unreliable framing devices, and meta-fictional elements create a story that’s rich for interpretation but can feel impenetrable during the experience itself. Some players finished the game with a clear understanding of what happened. Others finished equally satisfied but couldn’t explain the story coherently. Whether that ambiguity is a feature or a flaw depends entirely on what you want from narrative.
Trust as a Design Principle
The defining quality of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is trust. Simogo trusts that you’re smart enough, patient enough, and engaged enough to solve every puzzle without help. They trust that you’ll take notes. They trust that you’ll sit with confusion until clarity arrives. And they trust that the satisfaction of solving a problem entirely on your own terms is worth the frustration of being stuck. That trust produces a relationship between player and game that’s vanishingly rare, one where every breakthrough feels completely earned because no systems smoothed the path for you.
Should You Play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes?
If you love puzzle games that respect your intelligence and demand your full attention, this is one of the best ever made. Players who enjoyed decoding mysteries, cracking ciphers, and piecing together fragmented narratives will find dozens of hours of deeply rewarding content. Bring a notebook. Block out your evening. Turn off your phone.
Do not play this if you need momentum in your games. Long stretches without progress are part of the experience, not a failure state. If math-heavy puzzles or cipher decoding frustrate rather than excite you, several of the game’s core puzzles will be barriers. And if ambiguous, multi-layered narratives leave you unsatisfied rather than intrigued, the story won’t deliver the closure you want.
The Verdict on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a masterwork of puzzle design wrapped in an art-house mystery that refuses to explain itself. Simogo built something that trusts its audience completely, and for the audience that meets it on those terms, the result is extraordinary. It’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t try to be. That uncompromising vision is exactly what makes it remarkable. The hotel stays with you long after you’ve solved its final lock, and very few games can claim that kind of lasting presence.