The Inspiration Behind The Hit Puzzler Lorelei And The Laser Eyes

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a multi-layered experience – a game that only reveals its true depth to those who go looking for it. I was astounded by the narrative finesse of Lorelei, becoming gradually more impressed as I piloted the eponymous protagonist through the winding trials of the Hotel Letztes Jahr.

While a lot of puzzlers self-contain their puzzles, giving you all the tools to find the solution right on your screen, Lorelei requires you give your full attention to the narrative clues you receive along the way. It’s a captivating approach that has attracted praise from players and critics alike.

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Review: Surrealist Puzzling Perfection

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes could be an all-timer for fans of cerebral, surrealist puzzle games.

I figured a game with as much depth as Lorelei must have undergone a process of intense planning to ensure everything fit together perfectly, so I was surprised to hear during a conversation with studio co-founder Simon Flesser that Simogo’s creative process is more free-flowing than you’d expect.

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“The story grew a lot during the project,” Flesser begins. “There wasn’t a thought-out story for the first two years at least. It was also a very different game, it was much more mechanical and based on totally different things… When we got quite late into the project, about 8 months before it was done, that was when you could see it and say ‘this is actually quite good’. It’s a game that isn’t necessarily built on one foundation, it has millions of small things that come together to build a holistic game.”

After the release of Sayonara Wild Hearts in 2019, the team at Simogo was looking for a quick project that would only take them a couple of years at most. That didn’t quite go according to plan as Lorelei and the Laser Eyes would take the studio almost five years to develop and release.

“I would say, in the end, this iteration of Lorelei took about two years,” Flesser explains. “We sort of went through two or three iterations, there were some components like characters and exploring a mansion that stayed, but it was more conceptual in its gameplay, and we had some action-oriented versions as well. The plan was never to have it be that long, and I would not recommend anyone work that long on a single project.”

Long development cycles are standard practice in the triple-A industry, but the more esoteric experiences that studios like Simogo craft are usually created in a year or two. Flesser adds that even though Lorelei took a while, the experience was very joy-filled for the team as there was a consistent sense of progression throughout the project.

“The project starts making sense throughout,” Flesser says. “It’s generally more joyful to work on new things, right? Lorelei allowed us to do new things constantly, we had so many layers and they were so varied, even though the gameplay is the same in many sections. There’s so many different kinds of things we could do, and we had some pretty robust tools that allowed us to quickly put in new stuff.”

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23 Minutes Of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Gameplay | The Rundown

I spy with my little laser eyes: a masterful new puzzle game.

The constant iteration certainly paid off, with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes receiving widespread praise. In my own review, I called it a “potential all-timer for fans of the genre.” While Flesser felt Lorelei was certainly a good game, he wasn’t sure how people would react to something non-traditional.

“I thought it would be a bit more divisive than it was,” he revealed. “It’s got a lot of praise, It’s nice to see when people get it, they really get it. It’s kind of an odd game, but it’s built on very classic foundations. It’s kind of slow and you need to read big chunks of text. That being said, we did try and make it so you don’t actually have to dig too deep into the story, you can sort of treat it like a puzzle book if you want to.”

I raised the topic of online guides, and if seeing puzzle solutions online ‘bothered’ the team. “There’s random elements to most of the puzzles,” Flesser responds. “We’re not bothered when people use guides, but it’s nice when people understand the puzzles, so even if they were looking at guides, they would need to understand most of the puzzles to understand the reasoning behind the puzzles rather than just putting in 1234.”

“It doesn’t bother me, but I think it sort of takes the idea out of this game I would say. The entire loop is new puzzle, new puzzle, new puzzle… I would say you’re sort of missing the point.”

The narrative of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes involves a social experiment of sorts, the player (as Lorelei) must figure out a coherent timeline of events and navigate the eccentric puzzles of the artist and hotel owner Renzo. There is a lot of lore packed into Lorelei, and several mini ‘worlds’ within the hotel, like the video games and VHS tapes you can ‘enter’.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes artist in woods

According to Flesser, Lorelei was inspired by the works of Paul Auster, especially Book of Illusions and Oracle Night, two novels that involve the main character writing their own novel, “books within books,” as Flesser put it. The idea of a puppet master like Renzo is partially inspired by The Magus by John Fowles.

There’s always enthusiasm from a team to move onto the next project after a successful release, and Simogo is no different. Flesser says the team is trying new things, and they love novel experiences.

“We’re not necessarily either puzzle fans or adventure fans, I don’t know if we make genre games. It’s interesting to dabble in stuff that you’re not necessarily a fan of because then you have sort of have this outside perspective of how you want to approach things.”