I don't know how to classify Leilaa hand drawn design, sort of point and click, sort of puzzle adventure this summer. I would say it might be a Gorogoa-like, but the demo is also a series of small vignettes that reminded me a little Edith Finch, but much less in depth. It's about a middle-aged woman who navigates her past and present by taking a closer look at her mind, which means sorting through a multitude of magical and realistic jumbles of memories. It's very pretty and I really liked the demo.
The titular Leila is married with a child, is a little dissatisfied with life, and finds that she sometimes falls into holes that she digs in her mind, as she puts it. So now, instead of falling, she will explore her mind for a specific purpose. She frequently breaks the fourth wall in the demo, as you explore a deep, dark forest and find a picnic with a projector, which leads you to a memory of a cafe – a scene where you have to find images in the negative spaces in between. things.
Another memorable nesting memory in the demo takes Leila to her childhood treehouse, where she finds herself stuck like Alice in Wonderland. You have to manipulate her limbs until she can open a dollhouse in the corner, which is actually a model of her adult house, where you have to do household chores as a little doll version of Leila . It's a really nice flow of associations and a good representation of how your mind connects different things.
It's very “groping”, with instructions given via a slightly obscure voiceover from Leia – in this cafe scene, for example, she will say variations on words like “absence!” and “empty!” until you spot the first negative spatial image of a speech bubble, tree, or whatever. In a scene, you have a number of guesses to find different items, and each wrong guess produces a light bulb and makes the picture darker, and therefore harder to search – but if you fail, the level restarts. There is no timer. I can see this being frustrating for streamers who need specific guidelines, but I enjoyed digging into things to figure out what I was supposed to do.
Leila will be released during the third trimester, and you can check out the Steam demonstrate it now.
