Center Stage: Hotel Letztes Jahr (Lorelei and the Laser Eyes)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

They call it a hotel, but that’s not really true. It’s a mansion, some pretty thing hidden away in the forests of… Germany, perhaps. You’ve got three floors, a cellar, a loft, and not a door without a lock. Half the doors are “shortcuts” bolted from only one side, and several hallways lead to only them. Every question solved rewards you with yet another question. You’ll test your brain just to walk into a room, only to find an art installation that confounds you. The architecture is actively confusing and unhelpful. But you can’t not try to make sense of it, to open that shortcut, and to get to the bottom of this. The answer’s there, just beyond your grasp.

Image: Source Gaming. The hotel’s courtyard, where foreshadowing abounds.

The exquisite Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was one of several puzzle games that brightened last May, and probably the most stylish. Shot in a neo-noir black and white and filled with a surreal, almost Lynchian energy, it is one of the year’s best releases. Its music is haunting, its examination of artistic hubris and cruelty tells a grand, challenging story, and through an aggressively open-ended design it feels as though your journey is fully your own. It immerses you in a mesh of social and artistic and technological touchstones, a world that is both ahead of its time and appealingly vintage. Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo has crafted a superlative world of intrigue and magic, one which constantly expands, contracts, and falls back in on itself. I adore it.

But, more than anything else, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a video game. It tells its story through the language of games. At times this gets deliberate (in that there are playable games within this game), but everything from the plot to the worldbuilding to the level design are expressed through the puzzles you solve. This creates an incredible drip feed where a reward can be a plot twist that may also be the solution to a question asked hours ago or hours from now. It also makes writing about it a different kind of a puzzle, because critics like me write about games like Lorelei because we want readers like you to play it, and this is one you should go into alone. I can avoid divulging truths about the mysterious protagonist, the mad artists Renzo Nero and Lorelei Weiss, and the sins that course through the walls of this hotel. But… even mechanics say so much. This game deserves to be played with as little knowledge going in. This is why this may be the only review of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes that refers to this setting with a name more defined than simply a “mysterious” or “seemingly abandoned” hotel. That said, I will do my level best by focusing on the most tangible thing here: the setting.

Image: Source Gaming. The second floor, featuring a film poster from a character’s past. The game is full of lore and details in its art and architecture.

The most immediate comparison for Lorelei is Resident Evil, particularly the entries with a single big location. And from the most basic level of gameplay, that’s exactly what it is. Your job is, ultimately, to open locks in lieu of zombies, as many as you can, until you find whatever it is you need to find. And they’re everywhere, all doors and gates and even things that don’t even appear to be barriers. Many are big, or small, or obfuscate what they are. A large number are “one-off” riddles whose clues are in the room, but plenty are not, demanding information from a plethora of flavor text or a key-like object you might pick up somewhere else. The game is mostly good at hinting at which kind are which, but it rarely actively tells you, so a lot of the game involves finding locks you don’t know how to use or keys whose function may be obscured. And to dissuade you even further, you’re saturated in information, with prompts so open ended that obsessive guessing will tire you out long before you find the answer. I know; there was a puzzle that stumped me fully. The answer seemed obvious, a specific code with unique digits, and after that didn’t work I tried every single combination of those numbers and got nothing.

Of course, all of this is on you. Hotel Letztes Jahr is tight as a drum, and overt hints are rare and potentially in entirely different areas. It’s up to you to make these connections yourself. The in-game manual openly recommends pulling out a pen and paper to jot down notes and work through riddles. I’d second that. It’s extremely useful to have information like character names or the shapes of objects right there, even if your “Photographic Memory” already collates every clue, scrap of fictional history, and map of the mansion you find. Besides, it staves off the desire to just book it to the internet. The physicality of the jotting this down is also really powerful, especially if you, like me, wind up with a three ring binder utterly jam-packed with the kinds of writings one might associate with a raving conspiracist. I mean, look at this:

Image: Source Gaming. Pages 2 and 3 of my notes.

Look at this.

Image: Source Gaming. I’d recommend that people not try too hard to recreate maps.

Or this:

Image: Source Gaming. A large portion of my notes were just used to jot down historical or numerological information from other clues. As the game goes on, you’ll increasingly have to work through multiple of these at once.

Showing these might be excessive, but this is just a fraction of what I wrote. I wrote page after page after page of hastily jotted equations and hints. But it made the information stick in my brain. It also just felt good to do this, like I was a real investigator rifling through complex data.

The Spencer Mansion isn’t the only classic game location this evokes; as a collage of locks in need of keys, the hotel is a full-on dungeon from The Legend of Zelda. A Metroidvania with dates and names replacing double jumps. The experience is one of slowly and methodically opening up a closed space. And while some keys are like those of bespoke dungeons and get doled out at specific points, the vast majority are not. All they need is an answer, maybe a sequence of letters in a padlock or a number on a dial. So while I argued that you can’t brute force your way through without driving yourself mad, it’s also possible for you to, say, figure out a small range and work through it. That’s how I solved a puzzle that involved counting. It also encourages you to explore, because the information you need may be elsewhere, or it may be tied to a disconnected problem somewhere else. As you go on, you start to get better at sifting through the red herrings.

On a macro level, the Hotel Letztes Jahr is a natural extension of this design philosophy. As a rule, you want to open up rooms, doors, and hallways, because something in them is gonna be useful in some capacity. And since these “somethings” are often in the form of separate puzzles (either literal puzzles or documentary evidence with a well-hidden clue), this creates this feedback loop of solving conundrums for the chance to solve more conundrums. Catnip for any fan of brain busters. However, this is somewhat more structured than the individual puzzles. Opening up rooms, floors, and shortcuts is extraordinarily open ended, to the point where I’m unsure of how hard of a critical path there is once you get inside the building. But there is, most likely, a common series of paths as you make progress in some way. Certain hallways and avenues are just easier to open; some are dependent on a clue or key you get somewhere else. This reaches its apex with several mid- and endgame challenges that are so built around multiple levels of knowledge that you’re jumping from one source to another. Even some keys are themselves puzzles. And the best part of the game is this balancing act between navigating and juggling and untangling this giant, building-sized knot. It’s a delightful refrain of “eureka” moments, and it could only work with a space like this. Having it be disconnected or abstract would fully break that immersion—and even worse, it’d make those multi-part puzzles all but impossible to figure out. So while it’s unusual for the game to, for instance, eschew all forms of fast travel, you need to physically be here. You need to engage with it as contiguous.

Image: Source Gaming. The biggest challenge in Lorelei, at least other than its end game puzzles, is simply opening up more and more of the building. Rooms and outcroppings and doors look tantalizing well before you open them.

Perhaps there are some issues. I do think it can be unclear exactly when you need information from elsewhere and when you have everything with you. On the whole the game is great about it, and I’d regularly have wonderful revelations about riddles hours after finding them. But some of these are just so inscrutable that they beggar belief. This is particularly true once you’ve found most of the secrets (the game has a percentage of “truth uncovered” that I’d normally find incongruous with the premise, but I found it helpful) and what’s left is painfully hard. Once you’re dealing with spatial and temporal reasoning, or layers of codes stacked on top of each other, it can become unclear very quickly what you need, or where to get it, if you already have it, and how to make the connection if you do. You’re fully expected to do the heavy lifting, to the point where an in-game “hint” system is a deliberate joke.

The confounding milieu certainly doesn’t get any easier once it starts working in extensive real world knowledge. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes explicitly expects a knowledge of things like Roman numerals, mathematics, lunar phases, astrology, and strobogrammatic numbers. Thankfully it also provides all this information; it literally dumps it in places like the library, and they’re also stored in that Photographic Memory. This is yet another interesting twist on the fact that this stuff is fully solvable with the right information, information already available to a player familiar with Zodiac signs or the Latin names of Biblical figures (though puzzles are almost never just about having that knowledge; you still need to use it as a cipher to translate an answer). Part of why writing down info is so useful is so you can do things like work through a problem without having to constantly go through the menu, or try to draw multiple things you see on screen and compare them. And in the case that you missed something, retracing your steps is an option. Breaking down each shortcut helps with that immensely.

Image: Source Gaming. A strange maze in Lorelei, one that’s unclear and challenging and yet oddly familiar. Puzzles in this space are very scary—you instantly die if you get them wrong.

Exploring this space forms the bulk of the game, but not all of it. There are… sequences of a sort that take you out of the hotel in some way or another. Like the games within the game. Many use the same structure; some incorporate entirely new graphics, perspectives, or mechanics. They are uniformly imaginative, but I often found them the weakest parts of the experience, largely because they’re so separate. They can be cool as short bursts, but they’re still disconnected from this wonderful space. Fittingly, the things you get out of them feel the most obtuse and least parsable in a game where clues are more of a currency than the actual currency you can spend mostly on silly doodads. In a way, it’s a fascinating spin on a difficulty curve: the harder puzzles reward you with solutions that demand greater scrutiny. And speaking of difficulty, these are where you’ll most find the rare puzzles that will literally kill you if you fail, a pretty stark and slightly extreme reminder that this game eschews autosaving.

When I started Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I made a vow to solve as much of it as I could without perusing online walkthroughs. Asking specific online friends was okay (if useless since none of them have played this) and working through parts with people I know; those are okay. In fact, I think the game is a stellar co-op experience. Perhaps it’s even the best way to play. But there’s a difference between working through a problem with someone and having the answer given to you. I don’t consider myself good at puzzles or puzzle games, but I love them, and I want to feel like I did my best. Plus, this game is so intricately made that an impossible puzzle might only be solvable with information guarded by another impossible puzzle, and I was scared to cause a knock on effect of spoiling large chunks of the game. Unfortunately, from my lifetime of experience, guides are a lot better at telling you the answer than they are at helping you through it.

Image: Source Gaming. You’ll probably be even more inclined to look online when the game’s insta-death puzzles show up, like the one this fellow may be hiding. Try sticking with them if you can, though.

However, at the 73.8% mark, I gave in. I still tried to seek out hints, not answers. And in doing so I discovered something brilliant about Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which is that its puzzles… are random. Well, most of them are, in any event. And not in the form of procedural generation, but in the sense that individual riddles have different answers because the correct numbers or letters or what have you are chosen from a pool of options. I think at least a few puzzles share clues between playthroughs, too. This is incredible! It means that for most cases of going online for help, what you’ll be spoiled on is the path, and you’ll still have to do the work. Plus, the chain of problems and solutions means it’s fairly easy to take the answer and figure out the next link yourself. As it turns out, that was by design. Simogo knows online guides exist and wanted to account for that.

I think this is one more avenue in which the hotel bolsters the experience. Because these individual puzzles may be unique, but the space isn’t. In fact, the very laws that govern it are challenges and tools you have to understand. For instance, the camera uses crooked forced perspectives like those old survival horror games, with Dutch angles and cramped framing. At times, this obscures necessary information, while at others it’s a source. Something you have to acclimate to becomes a tool for environmental storytelling, level design, and hints on how to progress. Everything from the sound (which is diegetic and can clue you in about how close you are to certain rooms) to the black and white graphics (which are broken with a reddish, blood-like substance that points out important areas) is part of the puzzle. It makes everything you see, hear, consider into a tool. And even if it wasn’t bone deep in with the mechanics, the art direction is incredible. The screenshots here are just a taste of how much Lorelei and the Laser Eyes aesthetically gets from a look this good.

Image: Source Gaming. The composition here is key: a Dutch angle, a cavernous room, a broken window, a shape beyond it, and suspicious splotches leading your eye.

What can we take from this? Well, I think three ideas are worth pursuing. The first is something any fan of puzzle box design will know, that it’s compelling when the space you are in is a problem to solve, not just a repository of problems. It demands mastery of spatial reasoning, but it also means that the setting expands on the themes of the gameplay. The second is the importance of a place that feels truly contiguous. Clear signs, plausible architecture, and a requirement that you walk through the space are key. You engage with it at every turn. Finally, spaces can be used for examining narrative themes, not just gameplay ones. The story of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is tied together through Hotel Letztes Jahr. The graphics are built with it in mind. Its role as a hotbed of midcentury postmodern art naturally builds the world. Its strange layout matches your descent into this realm of shadows and screens and splotches of paint. It shows the value of thematic, mechanical, and physical interconnectivity. So go play it and dive into its spooky wonders. I suspect you’ll come out quite satisfied.