lorelei is not a bad puzzle, and i still like it to some extent. however, i don’t think it is a good “game”, and have to tone it down from that “Overwhelmingly Positive” a bit.

puzzles in this game are alright. but to be perfectly honest, they’re not that challenging… well, a few might give you satisfying revelations. but most of them are just mindlessly navigating around the map hunting for the final clue to complete the answer.

but the main drawback of the game is that there’s no “run” for character-control when navigate the map.

of course, there’s the “coffee” mechanic (i’m not gonna put that in a “spoiler” tag, thank me later) that lets you run around the map a bit faster. however, that’s not ideally fast enough to save your precious time wandering around this gigantic complex interconnecting mansion. plus that you need to unlock the café first by finding many mandatory objects. in my first blind playthrough (where i didn’t knew this mechanic exists), the café was unlocked at around half of the game!! (we’re talking about a 20hr game)

and the frustration is amplified by the “one button” control design philosophy.

almost all of the other modern games whose let you control your character on a 2D plane, it’s common to use WASD / arrows keys / left analogue stick to perform character’s movement. they also assigned dedicated buttons for frequent tasks: an interaction button (often X on the controller); an inventory button (Y); a run/jump button (A); a cancel button (B); and finally, a pause game button (start). also recently, lots of games adopt a map button (select).

how does this game designs the button? apart from 4-direction movement, there’s only ONE omni-purpose button that takes care ALL the rest of the actions:

• want to open this locked door? press A when you’re near the door.
• want to drink a cup of coffee? press A when you’re near the coffee machine.
• want to talk to another person? press A when you’re near that person.
• want to examine your inventory? press A when you’re not near any other interactable object to bring up a pause menu, then navigate to “inventory” tab.
• want to re-read your collected document? press A when not near an object for pause menu, then navigate to the “document” tab and dig deep to your desired page.
• get lost and want to see a map? similar to examine document, but you need to flip through pages to the correct floor plan by yourself!

there’s also no concept of “cancel”. so if you’re accidentally press A near a locked door while your intention is to bring up the pause menu, you’ll be presented with a door-lock puzzle that you need to navigate to the “confirm” and press A again to submit your (wrong) solution, get greeted by “your solution is incorrect” dialog that lasts 5 seconds, in order to just exit the puzzle.

when you’re deep into reviewing pages in the document, you cannot exit right away with just one cancel click, but need to press A to close that folder first, then navigate to “close document” and press A again to bring up a pause menu, then navigate to “close pause menu” and press A for a final time to go back to the game.

some lock puzzle are so absurd enough you need to input 5-7 Latin alphabets over a combination lock, but you can rotate each ring of the lock one way. — don’t overshoot the rotation!

why design the game to be this tedious? having dedicate buttons for each important action shall solve the issue easily. heck, more buttons should be added to provide quality of life instead! like when you’re near a “shortcut” locked door, there should be a dedicate button that open the document and jump to the corresponding puzzle automatically, not this walk-away-from-the-door-to-use-A-to-bring-up-a-pause-menu-then-navigate-to-document-tab-and-press-A-then-navigate-to-the-book-of-shortcut-and-press-A-then-flip-20-pages-in-this-book-to-find-the-puzzle!!!

i don’t think the developer respect your time enough with this design choice. and i won’t support this developer no more in the future if they’re still stick with this mindset.

Originally published on: Steam

neizod

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