Loretta Review 7/10 "A Nice-Looking Tense Horror Title" 🔪 @yabutuzoff @PixelHunted #IndieGame #GameDev

It’s 1947. You’ve just killed your useless writer husband and dumped him the well. Time to get out of town and start a new life… if only you could get into the safe where he’s locked away his final manuscript so you can make a decent payday from his publishers.

This is the setup for the tense and atmospheric Loretta, from developer Yakov Butuzoff. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, attempting to capture the paranoid vibes of Hitchcock movies like Vertigo, Dial M for Murder and a smidge of the desolate Psycho. Less a game and more of a visual novel, Loretta lets you guide the titular housewife through one of the worst weeks of her life while her sanity gradually crumbles under the weight of her past and her murderous inclinations.

This is low-key suspense horror rather than supernatural jumpscares, all delivered through a combination of 90s-era Lucasarts-style pixelated graphics and hyper-detailed close-ups broadly inspired by Edward Hopper. In a smart twist, the character sprites are all faceless, which both saves on animation, cranks up the creepy factor, and hell, why not pack it into being a symptom of Loretta’s mental breakdown too?

One of the smartest things Loretta does is use the 90s adventure game framework as a way to show Loretta’s homicidal tendencies. Interactions are littered with opportunities to brutally murder the person you’re chatting with, even if it’d be a terrible idea. For example, you can be chatting with a mildly suspicious cop and get given the following options: “I’d rather read it myself, if you don’t mind”, “stick a letter opener in his throat”, and “- Pass him an envelope -”.

I mean… who can resist seeing what’d happen if you pick option two and grab the blade (nothing good, incidentally). Butuzoff seems to know full well that he’s throwing temptation in the player’s face by leaving conveniently placed shovels, jars of poison, and pairs of scissors scattered around the house and, though many of these deadly and dramatic choices lead to a quick death and game over, you’ll do a quick Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time style “wait, that’s not how it happened” and restart a few moments earlier.

Loretta is done and dusted in about three hours (more if you want to go back and see alternative endings) which feels like about the right length for this story. Though it takes place over just a handful of locations they’re all smartly designed and bristling with period-accurate detail. The majority of the game takes place in Loretta’s lonely house, though even places you visit once like a dowdy motel feel straight out of a film noir.

But it’s not all good. There’s an unfortunate choice to include abstract minigames between each chapter that are either insultingly simple or just plain confusing. In one, you might have to put together a four-piece puzzle that could be from a game aimed at under 5s but in another, you’re tasked with keeping a large flock of bird-like creatures out of moving black holes. That last one took me about 15 straight tries, and there was no indication that I was doing anything wrong right up until I got an abrupt game over and had to start over.

They’re not fun, they add nothing to the story and are the one point where the game feels like it’s in danger of vanishing up its own arse.

SUMMARY

All that said, the stuff that Loretta sets out to do, it does very well. 

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in terms of narrative, gameplay design or visuals, but a short, straightforward and nice-looking tense horror title with a focus on psychological realism is nothing to sniff at. 

I mean, how many Hitchcock-influenced games are out there to choose from?