Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is a new notebook-is-mandatory puzzle stunner from the Sayonara Wild Hearts devs

The surreal pop synth of Sayonara Wild Hearts may have been the game that put Swedish developer Simogo on the map for PC players, but for me their earlier iOS puzzler Device 6 stands in my memory as being one of the most distinctive video games I've played. An interactive mystery novel at its heart, Device 6 took full advantage of its mobile-based hardware, asking players to turn and rotate their device to read certain lines of text, and scroll through its chapters searching for audio visual clues to solve its puzzles. I've often lamented that it never made its way to other platforms, even though part of its magic is inherently tied to physicality of its tactile origins.

Happily, after playing a few hours of Simogo's latest game, Lorelei And The Laser Eyes it's clear this equally classy detective story shares much of the same DNA as Device 6. It has the same love of riddles and mysterious, cryptic puzzles, only now they're writ large in a fully explorable 3D setting - a monochrome and maze-like hotel belonging to a reclusive artist. But Simogo's love of text hasn't been diminished in the process. Early on you find an instruction manual for Lorelei And The Laser Eyes within the game itself, which straight away tells you to have a pen and paper nearby to help solve its numerous conundrums. Heck, publishers Annapurna Interactive even sent me a full-blown notebook in the post just to hammer it home. They're not kidding, either. Even the opening section of the game had me scribbling down names, sums and symbols, much like Tunic, Return Of The Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds did before it. Which is just as well, really, as I'll definitely be needing some reminders when I come to play the full version on May 16th.

Your journey in Lorelei And The Laser Eyes begins in a forest in Siracuse, Italy, outside the aforementioned hotel. The year is 1963, and letters and notes in your car's glovebox reveal you've been called here by the artist Renzo Nero to view his so-called 'magnum opus' that he hopes, with your help, will 'transcend the limitation of art for humans'. Referring to you solely as Signorina, he ends his note by promising to 'put on a show for the eyes of the cosmos'. It's an ambitious claim from both Nero and the developers, but one that's very much in keeping with the fantastical conjurings of Sayonara Wild Hearts.

Along with the inclusion of that meta instruction manual, there's a suggestion right from the off that things might not be what they seem. The lines between truth and fiction are hazy, almost like you're already in Nero's magnum opus, playing as a digital avatar of yourself. Your handbag, for example, opens up to reveal a pixellated, grid-based inventory screen for you to 'use' and 'inspect' the items you'll find, like a classic adventure game. Certain parts of the hotel's interior have an almost wireframe quality to them, giving walls, floor tiles and select items of furniture toward the edges of the screen an ethereal appearance as you move from room to room. You also come across a Game Boy-like system called the Byte Seyes that lets you load up programs like an in-game calculator, while ancient, DOS-like computers serve as your save point terminals. They're all mysteries that I hope will be teased out over the course of the full game, but right now, I have more pressing concerns - like the dog at the hotel gate holding a letter in its mouth.

The letter only contains a very brief instruction, asking me to find the clue to unlock the gate's big chunky padlock code an earlier piece of correspondence, but the pertinent words are underlined in a searing pink crayon - a motif with which you'll become increasingly familiar. Many of Lorelei's puzzles fall into this kind of bracket - putting together disparate clues to deduce the correct answer - but others keep their puzzle pieces in plain sight, leading to a pleasing mix of document shuffling and good old fashioned logic work. For example, you'll quickly notice that certain locked doors in the hotel are accompanied by specific film posters from Nero's past. On their own, they make little sense, but once you stumble on some important bibliography information elsewhere in the hotel, their significance becomes clear. The same goes for the document tubes you'll find scattered about in drawers and on shelves. Each requires a three-digit code to unlock, but it took me an almost embarrassingly long time to link them to another set of puzzles I'd found earlier.

This is where your pen and paper come in, as making these connections and feeling your way around the sliding Rubik's Cube of information in the game is ultimately what fuels your exploration. You're presented with a lot of information upfront that you won't know what to do with until much later on, and it can be easy to feel like you're at an impasse when there's so much to sift through. The key thing, though, is that it's not so galaxy-brained that the answers are deliberately obscure or obtuse. I've been forbidden to get into the specifics of Lorelei's puzzles (though nor would I want to spoil them anyway), but the connections do come eventually, and you'll take another look at a document and realise, goddamnit, this is connected to that, which must be related to that other thing you saw hours earlier. Other times you'll feel on the verge of making an important discovery, only for that part of the puzzle to reveal even more mysteries underneath it. It's very like Tunic in that sense, its breadcrumb trail of questions and answers leading you on deeper into this maze-like puzzle box.

But it's not all cold, hard logic puzzles. Scattered throughout Lorelei And The Laser Eyes are moments of pure idiosyncrasy, such as being presented with the option to wash or not wash your hands after using the completely optional basement loo, or hanging up your jacket on the coat stand out in the hallway, or leaving your car unlocked out in the car park. And yes, petting the dog. With all dialogue presented as searing white text on a pure black background - a bit like in old silent films - it gives these seemingly inconsequential choices a strange and almost comedic irony to them. Perhaps something will happen if I don't have my jacket later on, or the strange woman with the fluorescent purple eye sockets who's sleeping in the bed in my room really can sense that I didn't use any soap after visiting the bathroom earlier. I honestly wouldn't put it past Simogo to make some sort of wry comment about these things further down the line, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they're just there for the sake of it either. After all, anything seems to go in this whimsical wonderland, and it all serves to make it feel more alive and enigmatic.

It's certainly enough to whet my appetite for more of Lorelei and her impossible laser eyes, and since it's launching on May 16th we won't have to wait too much longer to find out. That's a good thing, because I'll be real with you right now - my notebook's an absolute state, random numbers and names joined by wild, criss-crossing arrows and scribbled out symbols, and I'm starting to realise I really should have been a lot more meticulous about things so I can remember what's what and who's who on my return. My brain's like a sieve these days, and I guarantee there'll be at least one thing in there that I'll be staring long and hard at, willing some sort of recollection to jolt my memory back into place. Although my hands on was comparatively brief, all the evidence points to Lorelei And The Laser Eyes being the studio's best and most intriguing game yet.