Memories + Mirror Mazes
"We will put on a show for the eyes of the cosmos."
You arrive at the isolated Hotel Letztes Jahr, summoned by a letter from iconoclast film director Renzo Nero. In the front garden are four statues that represent the stars of the tragic mystery you will eventually untangle: ‘The Creator’, Renzo Nero; ‘The Artist’, Renate Schwarzwald; ‘The Magician’, Lorenzo the Great; and ‘The Dreamer’, Lorelei Weiss.
Nero is waiting inside. He tasks you with finding his missing script pages so you can both get started on your ‘project’. As you explore, you find yourself asking countless questions. What is the nature of your collaboration with this man? What year is it? Who is the old woman in Room 2014 with laser-bright eyes who just wants to see things clearly before she dies?
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a narrative puzzle video game by Swedish developers Simogo, published by Annapurna Interactive. Lorelei features many of my favorite elements of a cosmic mystery: a palimpsest of artistic reinterpretation of factual events, an unstable creative trying to escape the confines of capitalism, dreams, mirror-portals, and a creepy red alternate-dimension maze where people shoot at you.
For me, it’s essential that a cosmic mystery leaves its sleuth with a sense that the world is full of more possibility than before—in some ways running counter to the elimination of possibilities at the heart of a conventional mystery’s quest for solutions and What Really Happened. Without giving too much away before the spoiler warning, Lorelei is at odds with this cosmic mystery hallmark.
The game cares a lot about expressing its story and themes in its gameplay, creating a mirror that reflects onto its players. When you’re done with the game, do you walk away with the monochromatic satisfaction of certainty, or the kaleidoscopic possibilities of ambiguity?
I’ve found that cosmic mysteries tend to break out into three categories that, if nothing else, determine where they get shelved in bookstores: mysteries in which nothing supernatural is happening, mysteries in which something supernatural is definitely happening, and mysteries with conflicting or insufficient evidence as to one or the other. The ones that achieve more nuance typically involve highly subjective topics like art. Inspiration sits at the crossroads of introspection and outside influence. The alchemy of creation can be such a black box process that who knows where something might slip in from outside the boundaries of the mundane world.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes insists that, no matter the evidence, no matter your interpretation, don’t reduce the outcome to a single ‘correct’ answer. Spoilers ahead.
As you trot around the hotel, searching for Nero’s missing pages, the game pushes a few suspicions your way. The old woman in Room 2014 is somehow also you—that you’re both Lorelei Weiss in different times. Nero died by gunshot at some point during the project. Lorelei is trapped in some kind of eddy in the flow of time with Nero’s death at its center.
But you know something funny’s going on with time from the start. Lorelei is represented with stylized contemporary graphics, while the inventory is pixel minimalist and her car looks like she stole it from a Sega Dreamcast. The Hotel Letztes Jahr is riddled with black gaps, either in the process of rendering or falling apart. Paying attention to the jumble of different times not only helps you open a bunch of locks, its helps make sense of what’s happening.
Three years are significant: 1847, 1963, and 2014. 1847 is the time in which Renzo Nero’s fantasy horror film titled The Third Eye, is set. The Third Eye dramatizes the history of the hotel’s supposed former residents, the reclusive artist Renate Schwarzwald and the traveling magician Lorenzo the Great, and the tragedy that results from their search for the titular magical object. The film is one component of a larger interactive project Nero is creating with Lorelei in 1963. (Lorelei’s part is a supercomputer rendering the maze in which the Third Eye can apparently be found.) 2014 is the year in which elderly Lorelei is convalescing inside the hotel, which is scheduled to be demolished and replaced with a shopping/entertainment/golf complex.
Different types of art and entertainment were paramount in these separate eras, and many of the puzzles and areas you navigate as you search for the missing script pages involve these forms of entertainment: traveling magic shows, libraries, hedge mazes, theaters, film posters, trivia clubs, art exhibits. There’s even a video game debugging puzzle that captures the inherent creepiness of out-of-bounds areas and character modeling errors. It makes me think of T. Kingfisher’s Algernon Blackwood tribute The Hollow Places, in which the main character compares her encounter with a cosmic horror otherworld to glitching under the skin-deep surface of a video game. These debugging puzzle games, made to look like a PS1-era incarnation of Lorelei, include dialogue that hints at cut interactions, choices, and lore. Scraps of truth, sacrificed on the altar of artistic vision. Maybe these are references to cuts actually made by Simogo during the development process, maybe not, but it’s key to interact with the destructive aspects of creation. Some things get lost when you try to turn a collection of facts and ideas into a story that other people, or maybe even just you, can understand.
Many narrative puzzle games feature menus that help the player. Chants of Sennaar, a game about bridging communities in a sort-of Tower of Babel, has the translation journal; Blue Prince, a recent roguelite exploration game set in a manor with a variable layout, has the blueprints. Lorelei plays for the most part like a sprawling virtual escape room, and many of the puzzles rely on information scattered throughout the hotel. Its assistive menu is called the Introspection Screen, where you can access your mental notes on unresolved tasks and your ‘photographic memory.’ This keeps you from having to haul yourself across the grounds every time you need to know the moon phases of 1847 or the runtime of a Nero film.
The Introspection Screen also keeps track of your progress through the game in the most basic way possible: the percentage of truth ‘recovered.’ An early suggestion that Lorelei is perhaps navigating truths she once knew, shattered by way of mundane or cosmic trauma, that she must now make whole again.
Somewhere around ten or twenty percent, the hotel starts to feel a little Shutter Island. As if it’s all some immersive art installation created by the director Nero in this weird time-eddy just for Lorelei, in the hopes of triggering some cathartic revelation. And from what you learn about Nero, that kind of seems like something he’d do! For his entire career, he’s been at odds with the profit-driven film industry. He despised the control that the studio had over him, but also “regarded being out of control as the only viable way to create art”, preferring to “surrender to the ether” rather than money, which he calls a ‘red, man-eating beast.’ This ‘beast’ is represented in his script for The Third Eye as the legendary Crimson Beast, which is unleashed whenever someone finds The Third Eye, a source of magical creativity. His ‘Cinema Sostenuto’ manifesto is all about creating art without an audience, a dialogue between its creators and the cosmos. He could just make art by himself, for himself, and take a day job, but I don’t think he could survive like that. As idiosyncratic as he is, I think he needs to exist in other people’s minds, and he needs collaborators. That feels kind of like what’s going on, that Lorelei is the unknowing performer in his drama.
Why is the hotel like this? Did Nero find The Third Eye for real? Possible answers flicker throughout the game, and where they settle depends on what answers you believe, or prefer. Lorelei is fond of complicating the distinctions of wisdom, knowledge, motive, and truth.
In a heavily-redacted biography found in the hotel library, Nero says, of gambling, “cheating is part of the game.” In this game, the only time you gamble is when some kind of echo/ghost points a gun at at your head, demanding the truth. You start to encounter these ghosts after you receive the laser-eyed ability to traverse the hotel’s various pocket dimensions from the spirit of Renate Schwarzwald, who Lorelei occasionally played in Nero’s film The Third Eye. These ghosts carry the revolver that killed Nero. There are two kinds, and they both look like him. One kind represents a brotherhood of secret truths seeking The Third Eye, all identical copies of Lorenzo the Great, as played by Nero in the film. These impede advancement in the quiz club maze and ask you trivia questions about things you can find in the hotel.
The others are cosmic-horror Neros with mazes for heads that will periodically chase you through the halls. (They’re scary at first, but after a few, you’re turning around and running into their arms.) These trap you in a grimy interrogation room and show you a scene from Lorelei’s time working on the project with Nero. Then they make you recall things like how many chess pieces were on the floor, or where the white mug was hidden. If you remember all these finicky little details correctly, then you get a missing script page.
These are the only moments you can die—you’re gambling with your unsaved progress. It feels so strange that these high-stakes moments, framed by different incarnations of Renate Schwarzwald as challenges of ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’, rely on seemingly inconsequential details.
Cheating is a (potential!) part of many narrative puzzle games. Many of Lorelei’s more escape-roomy puzzles are randomized, which I thought at first was an anti-cheating intervention from the developers. Then I realized how easily it was to overthink these puzzles. For example, the answer to this one is just 32:
The game is trying to tell you not to overthink things for the sake of your own enjoyment. But on the way, I think the game wants you to be frustrated enough to go online and look for hints, because that’s really the only way you’d ever know the puzzles are randomized. Many puzzles rely on details in the hotel, background information on the characters, and supernatural lore. In order for the solutions to be randomized, this information needs to be randomized too.
Nero’s biography in the library might be redacted (with red paint, get it?), but Lorelei’s biography is entirely gutted. Her biographical details are mostly randomized unless they’re related in some way to Nero. The more relevant any little snippet of information is to Lorelei and Nero’s ‘project’, the more likely it is to be a constant.
There’s a puzzle of sorts in Room 2014, where elderly Lorelei is resting in bed. You’re supposed to try to prompt her into lucidity by talking to her about these randomized details from non-Nero moments in her life, but I could never get her to respond. None of it’s important to her. Nothing but her time with Nero.
These little details about details don’t give away the mystery on its own, but it’s good set dressing for the truth.
Renzo Nero’s The Third Eye was one part of a multi-layered work he staged for ‘the cosmos.’ One grand, unseen gesture of defiance against money’s oppressive influence on art. He made it without Lorelei’s knowledge or consent, and in doing so, took away his creative partner’s control over their collaboration. His death was the final scene.
Lorelei’s forced participation in Nero’s suicide ruined her. She stopped creating her own art, and she became more famous for her involvement in his death than for her own artistic legacy. She fixated on the events of 1963 until she found herself trapped in that time she spent with Nero.
In this light, it becomes likely that Lorelei herself is the designer and curator of the Hotel Letztes Jahr in its current form. She is probably the source of all those scraps of trivia and background information. Some are random because they don’t matter. They wouldn’t have changed what happened. Some are the little details that she can’t let go of—how they always had one black mug and one white mug, how they played chess.
What is the true nature of her imprisonment in the year 1963? Is it all her imagination? An art-sleuth’s idiosyncratic methodology of reflection and deduction? A cosmic recursion caused by The Third Eye?
Her statue in the front of the hotel is labelled the ‘Dreamer.’ But even in the driest ‘this was all a dream’ interpretation, Lorelei needs tools like apocalypse-themed puzzles, and alternate-dimension red mazes, and jumbled time, and big questions about the supernatural war between art and greed, in order to ‘truly’ represent these events in her life so that she may come to terms with her trauma. She finds meaning—and ultimately peace—in the cosmic.
NEXT MONTH
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Next month, we’re examining the juxtaposition of cosmic horror and police procedurals in Carmen Maria Machado’s novella Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU. See you then.