Leila (PC)

Social belonging is a powerful motivator and one that can unfortunately be at odds with being true to one’s self. Not only might it push you to hide things about yourself, but it may also lead to you acting certain ways just to please others regardless of whether it matches your true feelings. It isn’t even necessarily a matter of conformity so much as trying to hold tight to your connections by not risking them by breaking from what’s expected of you. Leila isn’t the first woman to experience such pressures and won’t be the last, but being close to average is also what makes her struggles resonate beyond the unique parts of her story. No matter who you are, there is some part of Leila’s story that cuts close to home in this narrative puzzler named after her.

Leila begins in the distant future of 2047 mostly to help its reflective story full of visual metaphors be realized through some futuristic technology. Late in life, Leila receives a gift from her daughter to help her deal with her past, a headset that seems to present the past partly through truths and partly through elaborate fantastical twists. This means at times you can be walking through a lush enchanted forest or helping rebuild a robot but at others you get an unfiltered window at periods of Leila’s life, the game only a few hours long but it zeroes in on key moments in Leila’s childhood, teen years, and adulthood. Leila herself narrates them with her current perspective on things, not fully at terms with some of her bigger mistakes but gradually coming to understand herself better thanks this reflective tour of her past that slowly becomes more relatable as its underlying themes start to become clearer.

Leila is often a quite beautiful game, the hand drawn art and animations making for many scenes that are nice to just stop and look at before you start clicking around to solve whatever puzzle is at play or to trigger more observations from Leila. There are scenes of comfort, of warm nostalgia, of lurking melancholy, and of pure whimsy, the ebb and flow of how fantastical things are leading to fascinating variation as sometimes a seemingly realistic scene will quickly twist into something abstract. Notably though, the game does take the strength of its visual metaphors a step into something a bit extreme with one of its chapters, a sudden incursion of gore shocking but also pretty justified in that its intent is to feel so abruptly unsettling. The game does warn you in the advance and even allows you to skip that chapter with only a summary, although it is perhaps trying to cover one of its most evocative moments and maybe, despite the extra work involved in retooling imagery in a hand-drawn and animated game, it should have found a cleaner way to represent it for those who might be unnerved. It is remarkably effective and even still surprising despite the warning, the visceral touch helping with the heightened emotions of the teenage years it represents during that portion.

Leila’s story is told in an arguably non-linear manner, letting you sometimes pop out of a time period in her life for a bit if you wish to resolve some part of it later. Major plot points still come at expected points and generally the build up is well-handled for giving you the pieces to slowly put things together. While Leila isn’t afraid to contribute her thoughts, she won’t spell out why she developed her mindset or approach to life, reading between the lines adding some richness to the experience without it feeling like you need to do all the interpretive legwork to get anything out of it. Leila’s self-reflection is scored with some lovely and appropriate music, but it is the way the puzzles can intertwine with the themes that really start to make this story feel quite well crafted.

Leila’s biggest focus is on the story about its leading lady, but to separate key moments, you are given puzzles that range quite a bit in what they ask you to do. There is no one consistent puzzle type, the player often experimenting by clicking around with the mouse to figure out what’s even being asked at them while the range of clickable objects is often kept small to help nudge you towards intuiting the challenge. Sometimes it will come right out and give you instructions, but these are appropriately enough some of Leila’s better puzzles as you are often given more advanced tasks to match. For instance, one involves the spread of rumors about a couple, the player needing to draw a guiding line through a crowd based on who is willing to speak to who. However, then there are puzzles where even understanding what’s going on is part of the trial. One has Leila cramped in a treehouse as she’s inexplicably grown in size, the player able to mouse over her limbs and see x-rays of her bones and needing to figure out how that even relates to what is being depicted on screen.

You’ll get a mix of more involved logic puzzles as well as ones where figuring out what’s even going on is the test, and Leila is pretty clever about how it hides important details so you also feel clever for starting to put the pieces together. At a glance a scene might seem inconspicuous until the need to solve a new puzzle suddenly makes you aware of subtle hints all around you, and if it really isn’t clicking, there is a hint option in the upper left that will give you a small hint to get you going without giving the whole puzzle away. Leila isn’t a narrative where the puzzles are just idle work to give it some interactivity either. Not only are some entertaining to solve thanks to how they are built, but others are interwoven through the game’s messaging pretty tidily. Leila is an author, a profession that naturally involves needing to cater to an audience while trying to tell the tale you wish to share, and so the puzzle tied to it involves tweaking the book ideas she has as she aims to achieve this sometimes painful balancing act. At other times, the game can make the interactivity meaningful without being too tough, like a portion where Leila does house chores, the game choosing to portray her as a doll during this little stint of clicking around find what needs doing. After all, she’s essentially playing the part of a dutiful wife and mother, something many a child has done by moving a doll around to play House. However, a twist on it later gives it a deeper meaning as the housework clashes with Leila’s emotional state, that ongoing inner struggle manifesting well as you feel your own efforts impeded by Leila’s internal battle for who she even wants to be.

THE VERDICT: Leila’s personal journey is about coming to grips with expectation versus personal desires, and rather than going for the straightforward idealistic “be who you want to be no matter what” answer, it uses its already realistic life story to search for a more meaningful answer on how to live. The relatable themes are conveyed with lovely artistry, meaningful yet fantastical imagery counterbalanced with down to earth moments that tie it all together into a richer narrative. The puzzles throughout provide an interesting range of interaction, from easier ones meant to help convey a message to ones that require deeper thought as you need to feel out what’s even at play. The game may only be a few hours long, but it uses that time well for concise story-telling mixed with good puzzle design.

And so, I give Leila for PC…

A GOOD rating. Perhaps a longer and more intimate dive into Leila’s life specifically could have turned this into the kind of story that hits emotional nerves even harder, but it does feel like Leila doesn’t want to be too precise with what its depicting. It’s a broadly relatable tale  where specific moments are meant to represent crucial decisions in its leading lady’s life, but the thought processes or impacts of these select scenes are key to building up the core themes. You can find more specific elements like the expectations placed upon a mother or an artist, or you can empathize with that ongoing and more universal struggle for acceptance despite the parts of you that may not necessarily appeal to those you love. That desire to be loved can lead to someone not loving themselves. Leila doesn’t feel the need to come out and directly lay things out for the player, the narration important for giving some key details to scenes that might not have worked solely on what they depict, but the surreal twists also allow the story to explore emotions on a deeper level. That chapter the game lets you skip has some of the moments that hit the hardest because it lets the harsh visuals speak for themselves, although Leila isn’t lacking elsewhere so its not like it needs the standout severity of representing the woes of adolescence to work. What makes Leila even more effective though is its ability to integrate puzzles that have some substance to them. It’s not hard to see a version of this game where all interactivity is just to get you from scene to scene, but Leila wants you to have to stop and think about many of its more involved problem solving challenges. It doesn’t slow things down too much either, so while connecting wires and solving a variant of the Towers of Hanoi doesn’t have as strong narrative importance as something simpler like the house cleaning, it also keeps the puzzle solving side of your mind active for when it presents some of its best mixes of meaning and logical deduction.

Leila is purposeful in its design, even if you may need to read deeper at parts to see why they were included or what they lead up to. It’s a game of emotional lows and highs and one that feels like it will resonate more deeply with women who are in the same situations Leila found herself in, but it’s not too hard to connect with the underlying conflicts that crop up in everyone’s life. It may not inspire you as deeply if your life path was quite different, but it’s also not hard to find the game’s heart, and the way the puzzles provide quality gameplay on top of true challenges gives it something to latch onto so it works both as an engaging game and an engaging story.