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Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Don’t ask “can games be art” but “can installation art be a game?”

It’s incredibly stylish and mannered; the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad is a primary inspiration, visible in the game’s fixed camera angles and challenging control schemes, not to mention the story’s elliptical dialogue and disorienting sense of time. The instruction manual is in the car’s glove compartment; a noticeboard is merely a written description of the items on it; textures and wireframes shift unsettlingly; one of the first conversations you overhear is about whether the name “Laser Eyes” is too much. The struggle to reconcile cinematic storytelling with the demand for interaction and agency emerges in the cutscenes, which are like a visual novel if it were made by a New Wave filmmaker – figures dance in animated loops and speak in subtitles, stuck until the player presses to advance.

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