I am now 10 or so hours into:
Lorelei With The Laser Eyes
and it is both Myst-like and one of the best graphic adventures I’ve ever played. Best to go in completely blind and play it. It has been phenomenal.
Sounds good!
It’s amazing. One of the absolute best graphic adventures I’ve played. Plenty of puzzles, and you are just dropped into the game with on idea what is going on.
BTW, thanks for the recommendation here. Seconded that it’s great.
Reminds me of Kentucky Route Zero, just with more puzzles.
I would say, and I am not yet down with Lorerlei, that Lorelei has a more coherent story than KR0, which I ended up walking away from shrugging.
I’m piecing Lorelei’s story together as I go, but am enjoying it immensely.
Yeah, to be honest I don’t even remember if I finished KR0. I liked it aesthetically, but not much of it made sense.
Lorelei has a similar magical realism and wireframe/lo-fi aesthetic, but you’re right, it’s much more coherent so far.
I like that it encourages pen-and-paper notes. I did that with The Witness, too.
KR0 makes perfect sense and is coherent, but literally everything is highly symbolic and/or metaphorical. And, while there is a story of some kind, you’ll be disappointed if you were expecting a linear adventure story or something similar.
Can’t say if the Laser Eyes game follows in exactly the same vein because I have not had time to finish it yet.
(I gather I am supposed to be an artist named Lorelei, but if put to the question I would not bet on it 
)
Eh… I guess you could say that it’s internally consistent, but I wouldn’t say it makes sense. The game takes place in something that at least superficially resembles our world, and in our world it’s just not that difficult to drive a truck from one place to another within an otherwise normal place in the US. It doesn’t make sense that the only way to the destination is through a weird underground road or that there would be so many strange obstacles in the way, even accounting for the existence of vaguely supernatural goings-on.
All games have these weird impediments to some extent (why can’t I keep going off the edge of the map?), but they usually try to hide it. Here, it’s basically central to the game.
And to add a bit, that sort of thing is common to magical realist works. Like in the film The Exterminating Angel, where a bunch of people just can’t seem to leave the room. Why not? They just can’t.
KR0 is a sort of recognition that the strange logic in magical realist works and the (practical) limitations of video games closely resemble each other.
Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I encounter something like that I just chalk it up to “dream logic”, and then it often makes sense. After playing through KR0 it seems clear to me that your destination is not a literal physical place but a mental state (for lack of a better word), let’s call it Nirvana or whatever, so it does make sense you can’t so easily get there. Indeed some people are conspicuously absent in the final act…
Lorelei, right from the beginning so this is not a spoiler, seems to be hammering pretty hard that this is some sort of dream/vision/imagination/film/simulation/whatever and leaning so hard on that fourth wall that that must itself be deceptive, but as I said I need to sit down and play through it.
Oh, sure. It’s just that I count that as “not making sense”. It’s fine–I like the air of mystery, in fact–but just as how dreams seem sensible when I’m dreaming and then fall apart when I wake up, dream logic is the same way.
And I agree that it’s all highly symbolic, but just like symbolism in other areas you can never really be sure what the author meant (if anything).
OK, for what it’s worth, I finished enough puzzles to reach an ending in Lorelei and my preliminary interpretation is that there is a story. You are indeed Lorelei, and the events of the game are your dying memories, remembering what happened.
Not gonna read your spoiler yet. Though I’m far enough in (~70%, according to the save game) that some pieces seem to be coming together.
Something I find curious: usually puzzle games have a pretty low completion rate. Or even play-at-least-a-little-bit rate. But Lorolei is pretty high, at least based on the achievements. For instance, there’s a “access all the computers” achievement, which has 45% completion according to the stats. That’s pretty far in! You have to solve some pretty tough puzzles to get that far. In contrast, at the 45% level in The Talos Principle there’s an achievement for basically “try one of the fan puzzles”. Not nearly the same level of completion.
I wonder what’s driving the difference. Maybe The Talos Principle was included in some bundles and a bunch of people never got past the main menu. Or something else that drove a difference in the owner population.
Finished it myself. Apparently missed one or two things since I only got 99.6% recovery. Didn’t use any hints, though some puzzles were fairly tricky. A couple of them were easy in retrospect but somehow took a long time to click.
Guess I might go for a full achievement unlock… I missed a bunch of them. Though it looks like some are very difficult.
Apparently I just had to
buy two more BYTE SEYES games
to get the 100%. Easy enough.
I know that if you want to buy everything you need to collect all dollar bills, but do not know exactly how the percentage points are calculated.
Seems like all the stuff added up was over the max.
$40 for the magician shows, $30 for the BYTE SEYES games, $20 for the plastic trinkets, $10 for the coffee… but aren’t there more things you can order?
That’s all I found, $100 worth of stuff that you can purchase. If you try ordering additional games, for example, they turn out to be out of stock. I have not yet found more stuff that you can order.
Ahh, ok. Guess I never tried ordering the other stuff. Well, I didn’t find all $100 anyway; I’m $9 short. Should be relatively easy to figure out from the computer stats display, though.
Not quite the same because it’s more about the puzzles than any wandering around, but I do love the whole serene aesthetic of Monument Valley. There is a story of sorts happening in the background, and if you get the Forgotten Shores add-on and play all eight levels of it between levels 9 and 10 of the main game it actually works to enhance the narrative flow.
I haven’t played MV2 though.