Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Story Summary And Analysis

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Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Timeline

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a complex video game with a deep narrative and mind-bending puzzles. The game barely introduces itself and throws everything it has at you, leaving you alone with a myriad of puzzles and even more documents with hints for them.

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, Shortcut Puzzles, Lorelei unlocking a shortcut

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes – All Shortcut Puzzle Solutions

If you’ve seen any of those doors marked with a roman numeral, then you’ve encountered a Shortcut Door. We’ll give you what you need to open them.

All these documents paint a picture of what actually happened to Lorelei, although if the ending is anything to go by, not all of them are to be trusted. If you want to fully understand the story of Lorelei, then look no further as we dive into the key years and characters of the game.

Spoilers For The Entire Game Follow

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Timeline

The woman from Lorelei and the Laser Eyes facing a masked girl in a red forest.

There are three key years that will end up embedded in the minds of any player that finishes Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: 1847, 1963 and 2014. They are used in a lot of puzzles, particularly the ones dealing with the core themes of the main plot.

1847, The Fictional Year

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes Main Character in front of a broken red window.

While the whole game is up for interpretation, it is stated several times that the characters known as Lorenzo and Renate are fictional creations of Nero Renzo, a highly eccentric film director of the 1960s. The play Renzo wrote has Lorenzo, a member of an occult brotherhood, approach the recluse artist Renate in her home, hoping to find the mythical Third Eye.

The year 1847 is when the story culminates, with Renate suffering a transformation due to her contact with the Third Eye. Lorenzo pushes Renate out of fear, who crashes through a window and dies due to the fall. This play was never shown or published anywhere, since it was only meant to work as a mirror of what Renzo was planning to do as his magnum opus.

1963, The Incident

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes man with smudged face points pistol off camera.

Lorelei Weiss is a young, accomplished artist who focuses on puzzle boxes and pieces reminiscent of computer programming as her art form. After watching one of Nero Renzo’s disturbing films, she comes into contact with him, and in turn, Renzo invites her to create real art with him.

Renzo tasks Lorelei with creating the ultimate maze, one that is sensical and nonsensical, all through the use of the OCU-3 supercomputer. However, what he is really trying to do is to mirror his own unpublished play, The Third Eye, culminating in his own demise.

Renzo wanted to create an art piece that had no audience, refusing to believe that the value of an art piece depends on those who observe it.

Renzo psychologically torments Lorelei until he can finally recreate the final scene of The Third Eye. Renzo goes through the same ‘transformation’ as Renate, gouging both his eyes out, and chases Lorelei while firing a gun blindly. Lorelei, frightened, pushes Renzo out of a window. He dies due to the fall, just like Renate.

2014, The Present

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes image showing an elderly Lorelei.

51 years after the incident, Lorelei is still reliving it over and over again, unable to move on. The whole game is about untangling her fragmented mind until the truth can be brought to light, and the truth is as such: there was an incident, it wasn’t her fault, and it is time to move on.

Due to the unreliability of such a tale, everything else might be a fabrication of Lorelei, including the time she spent with her mentally ill aunt or her expertise in computer logic. Still, the only truth that matters to Lorelei is her own trauma, and letting it go at the final stage of her life.

The OCU-3 Supercomputer

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes image showing Lorelei in front of the OCU 3.

All notes and data about the OCU-3 should be taken with a grain of salt, since the device might never have existed in the first place. But assuming that it is real, it would give a different context to what is happening in the game, and who we are playing as in reality.

Since 2014 is the ‘present,’ it is odd that there are documents dating after that year, not to mention the date we start playing the game on, which is relevant to the puzzles set on ‘yesterday.’ The main document in question is one set in 2022, talking about the OCU-3.

It is possible that Lorelei did craft a maze in 1963 on the OCU-3, but only finished it in 2014 once she was ready to face the truth. Since Lorelei likely died in 2014, it seems that the OCU-3 was rediscovered eight years later, and we are playing as someone in the present day using the OCU-3, and going through a finished version of Lorelei’s maze.