izigame.me

Yes, I would recommend this game...but, it's been a while since I've gone from thinking a game was one of the best I'd played to one of the most frustrating. The game is a sort of open-world puzzle game, where you can approach the puzzle in a non-linear fashion with a number of gated puzzles with prerequisites. In general the puzzles are fantastic, and the best I've seen in a video game, and they're pretty much consistently good. To me, a puzzle should make you feel smart because you solved it. That means balancing between it being too easy and therefore lacking effort, and too hard and therefore requiring guesswork, hints or too much effort. Only a couple of times did I get frustrated because I felt that a particular puzzle was too hard for me, and on the odd occasion that a puzzle was too easy, I was absolutely fine with that.

The gated puzzles are frustrated, as you have no real idea whether or not you have the agency to solve it or not. A few times you can sort of reverse engineer the puzzle, and come to the conclusion that it's impossible to solve at that point in time, but a few others don't really tell you if you're able to solve them or not yet. I probably wasted a couple of hours on this. There are several multi-level puzzles, where you have to uncover a layer after which lots of other things fall into place. These were mostly satisfying, once you got that top layer removed. The note-taking is a fantastic addition, and really made it feel like a proper mystery, that required plenty of skills.

Traversal is generally frustrating. The gameplay area is a bit of a warren, tying into the theme of mazes, but uneccesarily. The mazes themselves are just irritating. One maze that you have to traverse just once would be enough. Collision boxes protrude a little in places, but the main issue is constantly having to check the map to find your way around.

Music is minimal, but works when it needs to. The graphic style is pretty good; unique and highly stylised. Though the weird texturing seemed to be a bit more form over function, though the visible meshes here and there worked well to create a cohesive whole. We only encountered one bug, which stumped us for a good half an hour (playing on the Steam Deck docked with a PS4 controller means that one room doesn't function properly - you need to operate a handheld camera in game, so we had to add a USB keyboard, after which all was fine).

So why did I go more towards hate? Well, I nearly didn't recommend this game as I was so frustrated when I finished it. Firstly, one of the last, and most complex puzzles (which requires three solutions and is the master gatekeeper) became a grind. Our first attempt at solving it didn't work, which meant another ten mins of rechecking as we had to recheck each of the three solutions. Second, third and fourth didn't work either. We finally got it after a fifth attempt, but the little subclue we missed was just frustrating. Similarly, a couple of hours earlier there's an area that needs clearing, but without study it's very hard to determine if it's cleared (there are subgoals within the primary goal). Some kind of indication for these would've been nice, just so we knew which bits to recheck and didn't mess about for half an hour trying to work out which part was wrong.

Finally, the story. On top of the frustration of the above came the final portion of the game. Now, throughout Lorelei, you are introduced to an absurd, loosely structured story, with all the trimmings of a work of post-modernist fiction, with repetition, loose reality, and a patchwork approach to an overarching narrative. This is all fun, and really adds to the game. But for the first 95% of the game it can just be backdrop, you refer to it regularly, but you don't need to really understand it or care about the content; it's just lookup sheers. The exception is the very last section which comprises a quiz on all that you've learnt about the story, and suddenly this abstract, disjointed, chaotic tale is vital to completing the game. There are, I think, nine of these questions. The first two we guessed as we hadn't worked out the mechanism, and that was simply a first try guess to examine a theory. After that though, it was just trawling through the memories to try and find something that fit the bill. This was disappointed as we should really have been encouraged to glue the plot together as the game progressed, but the reality was that the story was parallel to the puzzles, not a part of them beyond theme, which meant that the story elements could largely be ignored. So the last 20-30 mins of the game are just sifting through data to try and find something that fits the bill, because I really didn't fancy spending an hour finishing the lore jigsaw. I just wanted to roll credits. This coupled with the fact that the lore and story is pretty abstract, as mentioned above, make for a frustrating end.

But, on balance, I enjoyed it more than I hated it, I just wish the ending hadn't ruined it for me.