Episode 173 - Serial Prankster - Lorelai

The Queen of Podcasts is weak to fire. Welcome back to the podcast,
and to the very special “games titled after women's names that
start with the letter L” theme! To start us off, we’re going to be
talking about Lorelai, a 2D side-scrolling adventure game. Lorelai
is the third game in a series that began with Downfall and the Cat
Lady, the latter of which is by far the most noted. Not least of
which is because we did an episode on it, trendsetters that we are.
Lorelai is a not insignificant visual upgrade from Harvester’s
previous games, but the themes and narrative beats between the Cat
Lady and Lorelai are very similar, just focusing on a different
character in the same world. Otherwise the games play about as
you’d expect. You collect inventory items to be used in puzzle
solving, talk to people and largely just experience the story. The
result is two very comparable games and one of them unfortunately
comes out on top by most metrics. We’re going to be talking about
the narrative and character writing, the big swings taken visually
and how they generally made the game more atmospheric and
interesting, and we really step up to the plate for step dads for
some reason. Thank you for joining us again this week! I’ve been
unreasonably excited about this stupid theme, but with one
exception: Lorelai was the only game in it that was a known
quantity to me. That being said, as a big fan of the previous games
by Harvester Games, maybe my expectations were somewhat too high.
What did you guys think about this one? Are you a fan of the series
and have thoughts on this game, or are you new and wondering why we
care so much? Let us know in the comments or over on our discord.
Next time, we’re going to talk about Who’s Lila, a mystery game and
a game with a mysteriously weird method of interaction, so we hope
you’ll join us for that.