Leila is a dreamy puzzle adventure with shades of Gorogoa

I'm not sure how to classify Leila, a hand drawn, sort of point and click, sort of puzzle adventure out this summer. I'd say it's maybe a Gorogoa-like, but the demo is also a series of little vignettes that sort of reminded me of Edith Finch, but way less in depth. It's about a middle aged woman navigating her past and present by taking a closer at her mind, which means sorting through a load of magical realist meldings of memories. It's very pretty, and I liked the demo a lot.

The titular Leila is married with a child, is a bit dissatisfied with life, and finds she sometimes falls into holes that she digs in her mind, as she puts it. So now, instead of falling, she's going to explore her mind with some purpose. She breaks the fourth wall frequently 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 coffee shop - a scene where you have to find images in the negative spaces between things.

Another memorable nesting memory in the demo takes Leila to her childhood treehouse, where she gets stuck like Alice In Wonderland. You have to manipulate her limbs until she can open a dolls house in the corner, which is actually a model of her adult home, where you have to do chores as a tiny doll version of Leila. It's a really nice flow of associations and a good representation of the way your mind links different things.

It's very "feel your way", with instructions given via slightly obscure voice over from Leia - in that coffee shop scene, for example, she'll say variations on words like 'absence!' and 'empty!' until you spot the first negative space image of a speechbubble or tree or whatever. In one scene you have a certain number of guesses to find different items, and each wrong guess turns out a lightbulb and makes the image darker, and thus harder to search - but if you fail the level restarts. There's no timer. I can see it being frustrating for streamers who need specific direction, but I enjoyed poking things to figure out what I was supposed to do.

Leila is out sometime in Q3, and you can check out the Steam demo yourself now.