Feature: “A Puzzle Should Be Structured Like A Good Joke”

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Image: Simogo

You walk into a poorly lit, seemingly empty hotel. In desperate need of someone to speak to, you hesitantly wander just a single room farther from the entrance, down a serene walkway. You are funnelled into a similarly poorly lit library. You’re second-guessing why you are in this hotel, and why it even has a library, yet your eye is strangely caught by a particular book among the busy shelves.

You let this curiosity afford you a few steps deeper. You reach up a tip-toe’s distance to that possibly glowing book, then hesitantly pull on its spine. You find that it’s heavy. It flops down and you catch it with your other arm. The book, now sprawled open, reveals the following:

Image: Simogo

You are playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes , the latest game from Swedish developer Simogo.

Arriving five long years after their hit Sayonara Wild Hearts , you’d be forgiven if you had no idea it came from the same team; it’s a muted and tense escape room experience much closer to film noir than pop album, yet it’s brimming with the same obsession with the human mind that Simogo is known for over their almost 25-year history.

In an effort to learn more about the many mysteries inside the game and what inspired them, Nintendo Life spoke to Simon Flesser, one half of Simogo’s founding members and a development lead on this Game Of The Year candidate.

Alan Lopez for Nintendo Life: What was your role on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes?

Simon Flesser: I’m Simon Flesser. I made a lot of different things on the project. I was responsible for the overall vision, but also practical things like designing and building the world and its puzzles, writing stories, making textures, effects, placing cameras and such.

I don’t think it’s inaccurate (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!) to call Sayonara Wild Hearts Simogo’s biggest commercial success to date. And yet, Lorelei is almost Sayonara’s complete opposite: genre, aesthetic, colours — almost everything. It’s much closer in tone to your previous games, like Device 6.

Did the team have to push through any external friction or internal nerves to follow up a successful action-arcade-musical with a black-and-white puzzle mystery … Read More