Lorelai

Lorelai is an interesting and yet very flawed game. It tells the story of girl with an awful family and a desire to get way from them. A very interesting theme to explore but it gets bogged down with a lot of unrelated plot threads. In terms of gameplay its very simple, you move your character in a 2D space, you can interact with objects/combine them and you have dialogue choices. All very basic stuff that worked in The Cat Lady. The biggest problem I have is that after chapter 3, the theme of a dysfunctional family gets thrown out of the window and Lorelai spends most of the game in this filler to quest to deal with this evil entity for a reason we are never told. I guess it's a evil entity so we have to kill? The time we spent on this quest could have been use to explore more her family ( her stepdad is almost cartoonishly evil) The chapters themselves also feel very disjointed. Some chapters just feel like they are an one and done episode and don't connect with rest of the narrative. The horror elements are also toned down a lot. If that is an aspect of TCL that you liked you will be disappointed here. The puzzles are very simple more so than the Cat Lady, but I'm fine with that, I prefer them over obtuse puzzles. This is just a nitpick but there are a few references to other games that aren't subtle and take you out of the expereince a little bit, a character says "Praise the Sun" and the character isn't even someone who plays games at all. Overall, I still enjoyed this. There are some good moments and I also like the soundtrack but in terms of characters, story and pacing it's a bit of a mess. But it's still a unique game that I would still recommend buying. The Cat Lady is still my favourite game from this developer.

The game is, outside of being the 3rd installment in a series, not good. As and adventure novel, it can stand on two legs - puzzles and story. The puzzles are basically non-existent. You just walk around and everything will eventually fall into place. The story is seriously hampered by several factors: - The characters are boring and I never truly came around to care for any of them. There isn't even a lot you can say about any of them, because none of them have a personality beyond their most defining feature. That would be fine in and of itself, if the game actually did something with it, but which it doesn't. - You never explore what lead to the downfall of the family, nor do you spend any time with the problems beyond a surface level. The titular Lorelai, for example, has basically no character. Beyond her own, very obvious motivations, none of the other characters make sense. John, for one, is just evil for the sake of evil. - While the story revolves around one single plot, its chapters feel disconnected, often jumping around for no particular reason. - Also for no particular reason, starting from chapter 3, there's another plot introduced, with no backstory, no motivation, and no meaningful conclusion. I have no idea why Jimmy exists, and he had no place in the game. Judged as a stand-alone title, I would not have finished the game. At no point was I ever invested in anything it presented. Yet I finished it - because it's part of the "Devil came through here" series, which I love. Both "The Cat Lady" and "Downfall" are amazing games, which are unlike anything else you can find out there. Because it is not a stand-alone title, but part of the series, its flaws are all the more jarring. A distinct visual style is the only shared feature by the games. TCL and D both knew clearly what they are, and what they needed to do - Lorelai, on the other hand, flip-flops around like a fish out of water. It's barely a horror game at all.

This game could have been great if not for a seemngly endless array of little annoyances that sum up to a mediocre experience. Some of it can be fixed, like the throbbing lights that blind the player in the first few chapters, or the crashes that happen from time to time (nothing game-breaking). But there are deeper underlying problems in the game's execution. There are good parts to Lorelai: the visual style of some of the characters and the music stand out to me; a wide variety of places that you visit throughout the game; and that the game gives you some (very little) semblance of choice. The less well-executed parts, however, are also plentyful. It seems that the author tried to bring together way too many ideas, and implement them all on an engine that they had very little prior experience with. The story is unfocused, jumping back and forth in time and space, with little explanation. There is endless & shameless pandering to fans, with references to other games (including the author's own previous games). And all of that sits on 2D-to-3D-to-2D transitions that detract from the story and from the gameplay. I don't think the story of this game adequately concludes the "Devil Came Through Here" trilogy either. I have enjoyed both versions of Downfall and the Cat Lady - there the ideas were clear, the stories supported them well, and the engines that the games were built on were not detracting from the story. I wish the author would bring the same seamless integration between the visual transitions, the gameplay, and the story into this game, to give a satisfying ending to the series. With patches, this game could get a 4/5, but the story, to my mind, will not fly above it.

This is the final entry in the trilogy (the first 2 games being Downfall and The Cat Lady), and it's probably good that the series didn't go any further than this. It isn't bad, exactly, but it's got some problems. The gameplay is just the same as in the previous games, and there's nothing wrong with it at all; the puzzles are all pretty logical and not too difficult to figure out. The problem comes in the actual story and characters. For one thing, the tone is ALL OVER THE PLACE; one minute I'm walking through fields of horrific imagery, right after some really horrible domestic abuse scenes, and the next, I'm watching a silly montage of things in a nursing home for the elderly. Oh sure, you just wore a severed pig's head as a mask, but now let's make a beard of bubbles for this old lady! It kept doing this, too, and since this is based in horror, it was pretty jarring. The characters were a little flat, too; I'm a sucker for a young woman coming of age story, so it should've been an emotional slam dunk, especially for someone who's also been through some horrible things growing up, but this one didn't really resonate with even me that way. Again, it wasn't bad, and I don't regret my time with it - I certainly enjoyed it more than The Cat Lady - but I would've been just fine having stuck with Downfall.