How “Resident Evil”, “Silent Hill”, “Myst”, and more cracked the puzzle of “Lorelei and the Laser Eyes” (exclusive)

Simon Flesser, cofounder of Swedish indie gaming studio Simogo, tells EW all about this mysterious black-and-white puzzle box.

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To unlock the puzzle of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, you must first understand that virtually every aspect of the video game, big or small, is a puzzle in itself, starting with the title. Who is Lorelei and what are laser eyes? The only thing the developers from Swedish indie gaming studio Simogo had initially was that name, and they had to figure out the rest from there, according to Simon Flesser, a co-founder with Magnus "Gordon" Gardebäck.

During the making of their previous title, 2019’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, they had the idea to release that game's soundtrack as an album from a fake band. “We had a page of those fake band suggestions which [composer] Daniel [Olsén] and I created," Flesser tells Entertainment Weekly. "'Lorelei and the Laser Humans' was one of the band names. We were just like, that's a nice cling. It evolved into this more rhyme-y alliteration."

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Simogo then spun out a complex, black-and-white, non-linear puzzle box of a game in the style of Myst from the 1990s or classic survival horrors. "I replayed the early Resident Evil games and the early Silent Hill games. I thought, 'It's a shame that there's so many zombies and s--- walking around that you just constantly try to avoid,'" Flesser recalls. "I realize that it's a very needed ingredient in those games, of course, but I wanted to capture that same feeling of being in the same [setting] if you could cut away all those things."

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In Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (out this May 16 on Steam and the Nintendo Switch), you play as a woman who's summoned by an eccentric man to participate in a project in an old hotel in central Europe. Is this woman Lorelei, perhaps? It's just another mystery for the player to solve as they are presented with an assortment of puzzles.

When you have a game focused solely on puzzles, Flesser acknowledges, "The challenge becomes that it's boring. You need to have a compelling story for sure, and you need to have some sort of excitement."

The creepy setting and eerie music creates a constant sense that something could pop out of any corner, which the game maker calls "crucial," but he emphasizes there's more to the tone than any overt horror element. "It's more this feeling of uncertainty, which I guess is dread in itself of not being in control of the situation," he says. At the same time, "It's not necessarily trying to only be dreadful. It's that constant balancing act. Sometimes it does very low-key comedy, as well."

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Flesser hopes gamers can jump into Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and discover its secrets for themselves, as opposed to him laying out precisely what this game is — something he feels is done too much with game marketing these days. That's why the trailers themselves have been so cryptic. "I've maybe shifted [my thinking] a little now, realizing ourselves that maybe we have to explain a little more of what this game is with newer trailers to sell the idea of it better," he says.

At the very least, he can say it's a game about shifting perspectives, both literally and figuratively. "That would be camera perspective, character perspective, idea perspective," he notes while thinking back to how he cracked the puzzle of the game for himself. "Sometimes projects want to be other things than you think you want them to be at the start, but I would say it's still about that to some extent."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.