Loretta opens with a woman, the eponymous Loretta, meeting a private detective on the porch of her house. In this first scene, she allows this strange man into her home as he asks her questions about the mysterious disappearance of her husband. You, as the player, click through different dialogue options, deciding how much she reveals. I quickly realised that clicking the option highlighted in red would lead to graphic violence – something the game doesn’t shy away from.
Loretta is a psychological thriller visual novel set in rural America in 1947. You play as the titular Loretta, a housewife, married to a crime fiction author. Her husband is a piece of shit, objectively. Loretta got fed up with him to the point that she took matters into her own hands, motivated by the discovery of a life insurance policy in his name, taken out by his publishing company in the case of his death or disappearance. She begins to spiral quickly after this, and you can either enable her increasingly worrying actions or guide her away from insanity.
The game does a great job of being creepy without going straight into jumpscare territory, though there definitely was at least one music-based scare that I encountered. It does a lot with its mixture of pixel art and briefly inserted, striking illustrations. Loretta’s house is decrepit and dark, characters are mostly faceless (creepy) and the sound design is immediately evocative, with a noir-inspired soundtrack, creaky floorboards, and mysterious rumbling noises. There are scenes that seem carefully directed to pay homage to the game’s artistic inspirations, among them Hitchcock, Nabokov, and the art of Edward Hopper.
Unfortunately, scenes are sometimes broken up by unnecessary puzzles that are more akin to interactive loading screens than anything. These puzzles are self-guided and not difficult to solve - worst of all, they’re just not any fun. Some have you rotating pieces of broken things which the game then neatly slots into place for you, which certainly would have been at least a little more fun if they were just puzzles. Others have you clicking on words at the right time, though it’s up to you to figure out what words the game wants you to click on and when. As interludes between scenes, they were disappointing and I wished they hadn’t been there or had been reworked to contribute more to the narrative.
There were also some issues with the text, specifically minor typos, and my character referring to things she’d seemingly said before that hadn’t popped up in my playthrough. There were also options that I couldn’t trigger even though they lit up when I highlighted them, which indicates that maybe the game wasn’t playtested thoroughly. I did find the ending overwritten as well, trying too hard to hammer its point home, when the rest of the game told its desperate tale well enough.
Loretta’s story is one of a woman trapped in her circumstances, desperate to escape. It’s also a story about fate, where as hard as you may try to guide Loretta away from the bad thing, events keep unfolding that force you to take more and more dramatic actions and suffer her decline with her. The game was harrowing, but your actions can’t change the narrative that much – she is doomed from the first bad decision she makes. All you can do is stop her from going too far, or let her freefall.
Score: 3.5/5. A PC review code was provided.