Something I've noticed after doing some three hundred of these Indie game reviews is that I've become attached to certain oeuvres: if I cover one game from a developer or a specific franchise of theirs for IGotW and enjoyed it, I'm more likely to eventually include everything else they've done for a vague sense of completion (excepting those that I'd already played/reviewed prior to starting this feature, of course). Playing The Cat Lady (IGotW #65) back in 2018 was a calculated risk because I'm not particularly into media with depressing or heavy themes, but I liked it enough and the bold decisions it made that I've since played its sequel/predecessor Downfall (IGotW #161) and was looking to play this game, Lorelai, for the longest time before running into technical issues (which, as of 2023, are no longer an obstacle). Developer Harvester Games has since put out another game—Burnhouse Lane, released the end of last year—so I've no doubt that'll show up on here too eventually. My approach to this feature is starting to feel a bit Wes Anderson-y with how I'm accruing a persistent group of familiar faces.

Lorelai operates almost like a lore linchpin for the loosely connected Harvester Games continuity, exploring a character that was central to both The Cat Lady and Downfall in a narrative sense even if she didn't appear on screen all too often. The Queen of Maggots, an avatar of death, was the entity behind the supernatural forces at work in both prior games, turning the titular cat lady into an immortal tool for revenge and Downfall's couple's retreat into a nightmare akin to The Shining. She's always been an enigmatic character, but owing to a larger presence in the story her motives are a little more laid bare here without necessarily robbing her of her mystique: a comparison might be something like The Outsider from the Dishonored franchise, and how the Death of the Outsider expansion made a once crucial but ancillary character more the focus. Lorelai does this through a new protagonist, the eponymous Lorelai, a young woman with a dysfunctional family she longs to escape from, taking on the difficult job of a carer at a retirement home for the necessary cash for a clean break. Instead, she finds her troubled mother hanging from the rafters and is inadvertently murdered by her nonchalant dirtbag of a stepfather. As with any aggrieved dead in the Harvester series, Lorelai's given a proposal by the Queen of Maggots to be her undead agent in the world of the living.

Much like its predecessors, Lorelai operates on a 2D plane with context-sensitive commands for hotspots in the environment. Inventory items can be combined or used with other hotspots, and there's usually an option to examine or interact with any given object even if some serve no other purpose than as set dressing. Standard point-and-click UI, in other words, and the overall challenge level of these interactable puzzles tends to be somewhere between easy and average; I generally don't have an issue with this in games where the story and characters take the center stage, Lorelai being such a case. This series has always been big on trippy visuals in particular, even giving its more quotidian backdrops a small surreal edge with unusual artworks and a combination of digitized photos and filters. Then you get to the purgatory world of the Queen of Maggots, over which she has almost total control, and it starts getting very Silent Hill-like. The Harvester Games series happily (if that's ever a term that applies to these games) walks a line between bleak Mike Leigh British domestic drama and surreal, gory, psychological horror, taking the everyday misery of these peoples' lives and giving them a supernatural twist. It can be a lot to deal with, and Lorelai's themes of the realities of elder care and infanticide (Lorelai has a frequently-imperiled baby half-sister, Bethany) create a couple new inroads to Bummersville, but for as emo as these games can be they usually treat these themes with the respect they are owed. The character designs and animations tend to be a bit gritty and jerky, but in a way that generally lends to the atmosphere rather than distract from it.

Lorelai's chief issue is that much of it feels like a lesser rehash of The Cat Lady. Like Susan, the protagonist of the earlier game, Lorelai dies and is resurrected several times over and in the process is drawn deeper into the Queen of Maggots's worldview and modus operandi. Rather than being an indifferent shepherd for the dead like any well-behaved psychopomp, the Queen acts more like a trickster or parasite that lives in the periphery of life and death and uses her considerable powers just to screw with people, giving the recently deceased a devil's bargain or whispering negative thoughts in the ears of those already on the brink of a mental breakdown. She invites Lorelai to do the same: one memorable chapter has you invisibly follow around a tertiary character, the recovering alcoholic carehome chef Al, and either push him back into alcoholism by messing with his life and undermining his confidence or do the opposite by encouraging him in his AA sessions and helping to avoid relapses. Lorelai's been promised more help to save her loved ones from her now very dangerous stepfather if she can corrupt Al to the point of an early demise by drinking, but it's up to the player to decide how pragmatically ruthless Lorelai is capable of becoming. Beyond this, though, Lorelai has her strings pulled the same way as Susan until she finally finds a way of emancipating herself from this control, and with only one villain this game doesn't quite have the variety of The Cat Lady. You could argue it's a little more grounded as a result, with Lorelai's vengeance reserved purely for a man she already despised, but it felt a little less eventful as a result.

I will say however, that the developer Rem Michalski (more or less the core of Harvester Games) has grown as a storyteller and a designer alike; Lorelai's a lot cleaner than the first two games with its UI and functionality with overall more intuitive controls and less bugs, and the little cinematic asides and needledrops feel more earned even if they can still be a bit silly. (As is, if I'm being honest, making the game's male romantic interest basically your own stand-in as a geeky but sweet Indie game developer.) I still reserve an amount of respect for these games for having such a distinct vision behind their bleak narratives and surreal presentations with enough of a traditional point-and-click experience to tie everything together, a genre I'm always happy to see persevere even as many other adventure game subgenres have started to dominate the Indie circuit. Horror adventure games come in all shapes and sizes these days, many also sticking to a 2D plane, but few do so with this level of overwhelming style.

Rating: 4 out of 5.