An edited version of the following was published in the Christmas 2024 edition of Edge Magazine (#404) under the title ‘The conundrum conundrum‘
Cheaters obviously prosper. We need only look at a floppy-haired buffoon who’s held residence at 10 Downing Street, and the once and future demagogue who will again hold court in the Oval Office, to see this. But how prosperous the cheat is can be judged only by the cheat themselves. While the material and financial successes (and failures) of the aforementioned shameless charlatans would make the average person blush, neither can have enough, not even the highest office in their lands, to fill the cavernous vacuums of their souls; nor would they see themselves financially prosperous, because one is putting an untold number of progeny through private schools and the other lost money running a casino. Because cheaters prosper outwardly, never inwardly.
Having just completed Lorelei & the Laser Eyes, I feel I have cheated myself out of a satisfactory experience. In my haste to finish the game, I have to confess that I resorted to walkthroughs to solve the last two outstanding items on Lorelei’s 19-page To Do list. Worse, I have the feeling that, were it not for a clue about details I hadn’t noticed, and still don’t completely recognise even after they has been pointed out to me, relating them to some wordplay, I would never have solved the problem. Without Google and guidance, like Dara O’Brien, frustrated by the Berserker he couldn’t dodge at the end of the first act of Gears Of War, so I would have been stumped in the final act of Lorelei. Unlike Gears, such is the story of Lorelei it demanded to be finished, and such is the intricacy and cleverness of its puzzles, the depth of its mysteries, that, despite an early claim to the contrary, uncovering almost 100% of truth is required to complete it. And so, in my haste to finish the game, and uncover a finale I don’t completely understand (and don’t know why I expected to), I have cheated myself out of an experience that I would have perhaps found more satisfying, had I managed to figure out all of the puzzles without resorting to an online search.
Or perhaps I lack the intelligence to have ever completed the game, and, if, like the games within the game, I had played this in an age less connected than today’s, I might never have finished the game, at least not until The Official (or perhaps otherwise) Walkthrough Magazine (“Find Every Dollar!”) was published some months after its release.
So the game leaves me cold, the illusion of its subtle cleverness spoiled because the final stages were more challenging and required more time and attention than I was willing to give them in a sprint to the ending. Having taken the shine off the game, the last puzzle frustrated me. I skip the last scenes, but my choices were bitter and sarcastic, more reflective of my mood than the magical realism of the world I had spent 26 hours (over not all that many days) so absorbed in.
If you’ve not yet finished the game, and have resisted the temptation of seeking hints from the sum of all human knowledge, the best hint I can provide for this game is patience. And continuing to play without access to the Internet, with your phone in another room.
Header image: Game Rant / Simogo
Nathaniel Byrne . com 