Simogo’s ninth release – a puzzler clad in the garb of Nouvelle Vague cinema and late-’90s survival horror – is, if you hadn’t already guessed, a game of contrasts. That is immediately clear as a stylishly attired woman arrives at her destination in a utilitarian car. Within its glove box is both a digital instruction booklet for the game you’re about to play (dating back ten years) and a typewritten letter from your host, with a hand-scrawled signature, the date (1962), and two words underlined in deep pink – the first colour you see in this monochromatic world. Already, then, the lines between fiction and reality have been blurred, matching the indistinct quality of the Polaroid image that subsequently falls out: a woman’s corpse, face locked in an anguished scream, surrounded by pools of blood the same shade as those inked annotations. We’re reminded that this game was codenamed Project Fuzzy Optics; yet, as we walk towards the hotel’s gates, the image is crisp enough that its polygonal edges could have your eye out. To complete the picture, the items in her handbag are rendered in pixellated form. Two questions come to mind. Where are we? And, more importantly, when are we?
The stage is set for a game that doesn’t so much straddle genres as shatter them, before gathering up the pieces and inviting the player to reassemble them. But then your role is to complete a picture, your task to ‘recover the truth’ of a collaborative project that your enigmatic host claims will “transcend the limitations of art”. Stride through the doors of the Hotel Letztes Jahre (you needn’t be fluent in German to spot the reference, though we’re in Syracuse rather than Marienbad) and you’re plunged into a vertiginous, spiralling labyrinth: a cracked, confounding maze of delusions, dreams, illusions, simulations and constructs; of sharp wireframes and glowing, hazy CRT displays. It’s distinctly European in flavour and influence (and, at times, language) yet its currency is American dollars, with single bills scattered throughout the hotel’s rooms, corridors and grounds. It’s a place that’s made to leave you dislocated and disoriented, with rooms projected onto black backdrops within which you can see a second, ghostly image, almost as if you’re walking over – or perhaps into – a double-exposure photograph.
If all that seems wilfully baroque for the sake of it, as its title suggests Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is a game with its sights trained firmly on something very specific, its piercing, hot-pink gaze scything through those ornate trappings. It’s in the corrugated click of a safe’s dial and the clunk as you turn the handle and its door swings ajar. It’s in the way the barrel of a sliding door lock smoothly slides back from its keep, and another wing of the hotel opens up. It’s in the telltale sound of a bolt in a security door retracting after tapping out a code on its keypad. It’s in the scraping buzz of a dot-matrix printer, feeding out a bug report after inputting a sequence of glyphs. This is a game that understands the primal appeal of locks and barriers, both the curiosity they instinctively arouse and the satisfaction when you work out how to open them, that sensation of anticipation and release – even when you’re fully confident of the solution – as you wait for the sound to confirm that you got the answer right. That moment is treated in almost fetishistic fashion, dozens upon dozens of close-up shots of these and other interactions accompanied by sound effects of pitch-perfect tactility. It’s pornography for puzzle lovers.