Simogo are a small videogame studio from Sweden.
I just realised that I walked past their building last Summer, during my short stay in Malmö. If I had known… maybe I would have left an envelope in their mailbox (assuming there is one), saying: ‘I love your games, please never change’.
They may have become more famous in recent years thanks to their high-speed ‘arcade game’ Sayonara Wild Hearts, but I have known them for their delightful rhythm-based puzzle game Beat Sneak Bandit and their atmospheric adventure games/interactive narratives, such as the eerie folk horror Year Walk and the inventive mystery Device 6.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is their latest work, in the same vein as the latter game; it was published in May last year, but I only realised it was out last month (well, I had subscribed to their RSS feed to be up-to-date… but then they changed the website).
I bought it without hesitation, and soon I was immersed in a mysterious story about a young woman exploring a deserted hotel, in Germany in 1962. The black-and-white (and red) graphics are hugely atmospheric - and sometimes disorientating, as the texture of the rooms in the building looks like pictures from another place, or another time.
Time, indeed, is folding upon itself as Lorelei finds herself ‘guided’ by an enigmatic Italian filmmaker in retrieving the script of a story that seems to have taken place already, possibly with Lorelei herself in the lead role.
It’s about modern art, and cinema (Last Year at Marienbad was a big influence), and time jumping, and magic, and coffee, and a creepy girl with an owl mask, and possibly cosmic horror. And puzzles. Lots of puzzles.
In short: it’s like it was written just for me.
So it didn’t take long for me to be captured with the intensity I felt with the best adventure games, becoming a sort of ‘background’ process in my brain, reflecting, on any quiet moment, on how to solve their puzzles.
Cleverly, the area to investigate starts small, and gets progressively wider and wider, to cover the four floors of the hotel, the front and back garden, a forest, and… much more.
It’s a game that focuses more on the pleasure of the exploration and the unfolding of a story than on the complexity of its puzzles. Even though some problems may seem unsolvable at first, Lorelei always gives you something that can be solved, with relative ease, at any given moment: I never felt stuck, except on one occasion, and that was partially my fault.
Partially, I say, because it’s true that I didn’t pay attention to a specific clue… but there was a reason: a lot of riddles in this game have the exact same answer, and I didn’t expect two consecutive puzzles to share the same solution; after solving one, I saw a hint pointing to the same sequence of numbers I had just used, and I dismissed it as something related to the enigma I just passed, rather than a clue for the next one.
I believe I was simply unlucky: Simogo like to randomise their answers, to discourage players from blindly following walkthroughs. Probably if I played the game a second time, this wouldn’t happen.
But having ‘swappable’ solutions also leads to some of the puzzles feeling just like… computer game riddles.
It conflicts a bit with my perception of Simogo: that you can appreciate the care they put into their games. There’s always something more in their stories, that goes beyond the surface level and makes them feel fully organic and rounded. They immerse you in their enigmatic tales.
Here, you get some story-related challenges, and some that are really disconnected but are cleverly disguised as related to the characters’ pieces of modern art. But, in other cases, they seem to be arbitrary obstacles put in front of you, with no context or relationship to the overall story.
Usually, I love callbacks in a game. One of the reasons I love the first two Monkey Island games is that the final puzzle requires you to remember things you did previously.
In this game there are several different instances of the same maze - or is it a labyrinth? -, which you have to navigate at least twice, although in different settings (of course, I loved the version in the ’through the looking glass’ dimension, with its atmosphere that brings to mind the Red Room from Twin Peaks and its background music, appropriately reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack for that show).
But, as enjoyable as the ‘set dressing’ is, going through the same long process more than once is more than a callback: it’s repetitive.
And there are many instances of such repetition in this game.
They make the game last longer (it took me 24 cumulative hours to complete it, having uncovered ‘99.7% of the truth’), but having to repeat the same set of actions multiple times is not very thrilling.
‘Getting it’ the first time is enjoyable, repeating the same set of actions three times is ok, but nine times… it feels like a chore.
In fairness, the developers took great care in giving variety to the gameplay, by inserting sections that bring back to different eras of video games, ranging from a Pacman/Lady Bug-inspired handheld game to a PlayStation-like horror.
I didn’t love the decision to adopt a single-button interface (except for movement). I guess it has great value for accessibility, but options to enable a ‘back’ button or a ‘map’ button would have been very welcome. As things are, every time the player needs to consult one of the many documents that contain the knowledge required to progress in the game, multiple button presses are necessary to find the right document, and as many to go back to the game. It’s unnecessary friction: I ended up taking photos on my phone to have faster access to maps and frequently needed information.
But all of the issues I’ve described above are simply linked to my impatient middle-aged attitude: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was a very enjoyable experience, fully worth its (low) price, that tickled my brain enough to awaken my logical and memory skills.
The game evokes such a dreamy and magical atmosphere that it was impossible for me not to love it. And there’s a very good dog that you can pet every time you feel stressed (trigger warning: there’s a lot of instances of creatures losing their sight - but you don’t need to worry about Rudi).
So, if by chance anybody from the software house passes by, I will leave my message here: I love your games, Simogo, please never change.
p.s. In the time it took me to write this post - and I had to do it three times because of some mishaps with my Obsidian/iCloud writing configuration - I managed to go back and play again both Year Walk and Device 6.
They confirmed my impatience issue, where I almost enjoyed the games less than I remembered because I was too eager to move on.
Device 6, with its atmosphere and terminals and codes which reminded me of Lost, is quite similar to Lorelei in terms of set-up: a woman finds herself in a strange place - a quite unsettling one, with almost no living being in sight. Also similar to Lorelei, the puzzles are disconnected from the plot, but the implementation is very different: the clues come mostly as voice recordings, and the game’s visuals are inventively text-based. I also noticed a background poster about ‘a terrible animal’, which is a title that comes back in this latest game.
Year Walk is a true masterpiece: again, I almost got upset with it, because I didn’t understand what to do or even how to interact. Again, I needed to take my time, try things around and, most importantly, pay attention, before I could enjoy the almost wordless immersion in Swedish folklore.