Back and shorter than ever with LORELEI AND THE LASER EYES
Less content just like you demanded!
Hi all, I’m back after a break… *checks notes* longer than 6 months?? Whoops. The design of this newsletter as it is – long-ass essays – has made it very difficult to keep this thing on a regular schedule. Long-ass essays take a lot to get out, as you have to make a good point to make it worth anyone’s while. Besides that, I’m very time-poor: I have a day job, I perform a few nights every week, I make videos for social media, and I write scripts. On top of that, this last year I had the good sense to add even more activities to my schedule: Learning to Play Piano (normal activity, minorly time-consuming), Being a Father (normal-but-life-changing, very time-consuming), Getting an Invasive Jaw Surgery (Abbie normal, had to learn how to eat again), and Making My First Videogame (a completely insane fool’s errand, I no longer see the sun). When it comes to time, I clearly have a problem. Beyond this laundry list I have kept up with playing some games, but I just have not had nice things to say about most of them. The world is already hard enough (especially now), so I don’t want to spend my time dunking on things that were made by hard-working, talented people.
However, I have felt the need to keep this newsletter going in some form, so thanks to inspiration received by some chums over at Hit Points, I’m revising it to a format that will allow me to keep up a much more common cadence. So if you have a problem with my upcoming output, blame Ravi by reading his excellent newsletter. At this current time, I’ll be doing the following:
Primary Piece: Narrative Critique That Is In-Depth While Also Kind of Short. You Know, Something You Could Read During A Coffee Break. In Fact – Wait, The Length Of This Bullet Point Already Bodes Poorly
Be Nice: A Short Take or Two Where I Exercise “not being a dick”
Oh, Good: Upcoming Things I’m Excited About
With that, let’s start this week’s episode! And lucky for all of us, I just finished an incredible game: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes.
The Stunning Vision of Lorelei and The Laser Eyes
Creating everything out of nothing
Lorelei is a puzzle game about an artist’s responsibility to create everything from nothing. With a story that remains abstract for most of the runtime, the game has a very specific style, using a color scheme that keeps most objects in black-and-white with specific items retaining their color. I tried describing this succinctly to my wife as “Schindler’s-List-style colors” and immediately realized that was a terrible idea, so I will not be doing it here. Instead, let’s say the game has a muted-yet-intentional color palette (just checked with the wife and this language is approved).
The opening has you controlling a woman with a tampon in her purse and a letter in her car’s glove box, and it’s up to you to figure everything else out. Before long, an eccentric man gives you escape-room-style puzzles throughout a hotel, all the while displaying that he’s unhinged and probably dangerous, leading you down a path of discovering just what the hell you’re even doing there. Finding out this truth is a journey of solving brain-teasers and experiencing a shockingly emotional finale.
I won’t be spoiling what that finale is, but the nature of how you get there, and just how effective it is for a difficult puzzle game, has blown me away. The genre of Puzzle Games is one I absolutely adore and I am also prone to being incredibly frustrated by it. The task of creating a puzzle game is enormously complex: to intrigue the audience and give them the tools they need to find solutions, all the while avoiding making puzzles too difficult, which would lock them out of the experience. I am someone who is very easily locked out, as my brain is very smooth. As described by Nathan Brown in his aforementioned Hit Points column:
“The difference [between puzzle games and action games], to my mind anyway, is that you can actually get better at [action games] through practice or research; in a puzzle game, you can either follow the designer’s thought process or you can’t.”
This is true in my experience (and it’s so validating to read). I will try most puzzle games, but Baba Is You became completely unplayable for me by the halfway point. I would initially look up the solution for a puzzle every once in a while, but as my Googling-per-level rate increased, I eventually realized that I hadn’t solved a single puzzle by myself for hours, so I just had to drop it. This is the reason that the modern critical darlings of Return of the Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol are such marvels - the puzzles are not obvious, but they also can be almost entirely solved by anyone, letting the player feel smart without having to be smart.
To be clear, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is not this kind of puzzle marvel. You need to be smart in order to solve all of the mandatory puzzles that let you traverse its narrative, and unfortunately there is no hint system to be found. I don’t blame the creators for not coming up with a hint system, as these systems are always reality breaking and I’m sure puzzle creators find it tempting to rely on hint systems as crutches. And to be fair again, these puzzles were not that hard. They weren’t Baba-level difficult – whenever I found a solution online, my thought was always “oh, of course.” It had been just out of my reach, but my mind just isn’t the kind that could make the connection needed. But given all of this, the game’s ending still felt completely immersive and hit me right in the heart. I even had to look up a puzzle solution during the gigantic reveal of an ending sequence, and I still felt completely locked into the experience while I was being locked out by my abilities.
As for what I saw, (again no spoilers) what I can tell you is that the story stays strange and abstract for 90% of the game. You find little clues peppered throughout that send you on different, contradicting paths of what the reality may be for much of the story. But there is so much clear intent that I never felt worried for a moment that it wouldn’t pay off. Everything felt like it was there for a reason. And the fact that this abstract story with brilliant-yet-fun puzzles still could coalesce into something meaningful and profound is bafflingly adept. This is a game that could never be created with KPIs in mind for the player. It is something that can only exist as a creation of a brilliant team with laser vision. Also, the three or four songs fucking slap.
Be Nice
New section! I give a brief take on a game that I thought didn’t quite hit the mark in terms of story, but I also practice grace by describing why it might work for others instead of myself - in short, trying to not be completely up my own ass. Note that I still may be up my own ass, please send a rescue team to find me if I get lost in there. You might find Ed Zitron as well.
Metaphor: ReFantazio - Great characters and often quite funny, while striving to make grand messages about fascism and art.
Why it didn’t work for me: I am American, which means that I am currently horrifyingly aware of what can lead to fascism, and this story does not capture it. The villain is a brilliant sadist, while I am watching in real-time how all it takes is a charming lunatic that a bunch of idiot sadists think they can control. Metaphor’s approach feels naive to me. Additionally, there’s a plot element involving how people can influence each other via emotions, and Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker did it better. On top of all of this, I found the pacing to be too lackadaisical with an unnecessarily long playtime, and as a parent (and mentally unwell planner) I no longer tolerate this.
Why it might work for you: The gameplay is fun and, again, there are outstanding characters. On top of that, the art direction is absolutely gorgeous and the music rips. There are beautiful, moving moments. The way you find your final party member will stay with me forever.
Oh, Good
New section! I say something that I’m excited about that I haven’t experienced yet.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center - Just released days ago, it’s a stylish mystery-narrative game by a new studio. While it may be getting mixed reviews, I just heard miksartono describe it as “a simplified mix of Ace Attorney Investigations, Golden Idol and Hypnospace Outlaw.” Yee-fucking-haw, I am in, baby.
That’s all for this week, hopefully the new structure works for you. I found it much easier to write, knowing that I didn’t have to create a cacophonous 10k+ word count. See you soon.
welcome back! be nice!