Finished Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
The puzzles are good, basically a deep dive into the subtype of keycode puzzles. How far can you push the 4 digit code puzzle and mazes. However, no indie game is allowed to make their whole thing about mazes anymore. No more for a while. Not after The Witness, Tunic and now this. We can find new puzzles.
No ‘back’ button has got to be the game’s biggest offence. I suspect the design philosophy of having only directional input and a single button is a sort of minimalism aiming towards getting the player to think about every input as a literal maze but… you gotta have a back button.
“The entire interface is a maze, if one must press a button ten times to navigate to the back button so be it. It’s like they’re really navigating the maze”
My inputs were probably doubled to an unhealthy extent thanks to this stubbornness.
The flashing and buzzing in some visual effects was also getting a bit much in places. You’ll need LASER EYE surgery after this (seriously just have an alternative for eyestrain/epilepsy).
The ‘Maze gunmen’ as a hard gate seemed to exist to encourage the player to save and I thought would pay off in some way. It’s not really a true difficulty challenge and if you fail one you just redo puzzles you’ve already solved which is tedious. I think if the save data itself had become necessary in some way, incentivising the player to create a save for the information could’ve been kinda cool.
The plot concerns competing principles of the technical and creative but is kinda thwarted by Renzo’s characterisation as unhinged. It almost suggests that rational technical people are just bothered by certain art, or that the art itself is superficial aesthetica with no connection to real life.
There are some nice flourishes when the paradigm shifts and you get a new tier of puzzles but there’s a lot of ‘clean up’ in the end game where you’re just hunting for a literal key to get you to the next set of things to write down. The final supercomputer section was cleverly presented even if the ending is pretty underwhelming. I imagine it’d be fun to play with a puzzle-minded friend.