Plunging deep into Simogo’s fathomless mystery
A round five hours into Simogo’s biggest game to date, we’re struck by a thought that, another five hours later, we haven’t been able to shake. Setting aside the gargantuan epics that duelled for the title of 2023’s game of the year, this thirdperson puzzle adventure may well be the most exciting, surprising, confounding and downright unsettling game we’ve played since 2022’s Immortality.
Ideally, we would leave it there. Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is the type of game you will find people more commonly talking around rather than about. Which isn’t to say that it’s the type of game where conventional spoiler rules apply: certainly, the lion’s share of the myriad mysteries contained within these rooms, lobbies and corridors will make little sense out of context. Its narrative is oblique enough that to reveal plot developments would hardly make much difference to anyone hoping to go in cold – and would be besides the point even so.
Still, there are moments here that deserve to be experienced without prior warning. Mostly they amount to subtle reconfigurations of expectation, the kind that cause you to realise this isn’t the game you might have thought it was – or, rather, that it’s substantially more than that. Though there are events, too, that will make you gasp or shiver, and more than one bona fide jolt. One, indeed, is – deliberately, literally – so clearly signposted that we find ourselves tensing in anticipation, and then laughing out loud as it arrives a splitsecond sooner than expected.
These incidents could feel like cheap parlour tricks, but they’re merely one method Simogo employs to leave you ill at ease. And they’re in keeping with the disquieting yet enticing ambience of a world that is powered by dreamlike logic and magic. Part puzzle box, part Zelda dungeon, part Soulsborne labyrinth, the Hotel Letztes Jahre (its name suggests a place that exists slightly out of time, and so it proves) is, at heart, an elaborate escape room. It offers a tangle of threads to be unpicked, one whose knots can sometimes take hours to yield. Even so, you’re seldom left stuck in one place. With multiple floors, a large cellar and the grounds to explore, there are always other secrets to investigate when you�
