In an industry flooded with overhyped big-budget action games and RPGs, Leila arrived quietly, and is a deeply introspective game that is capable of affecting the emotions. At its heart, Leila is a narrative-driven point & click adventure game that blends exploration with light puzzle elements (such as "find the object", or sorting/matching puzzles), all wrapped in a dreamlike aesthetic that feels like it may have been inspired by a few notable games, and yet is quite unlike them.
Set in the near future, you play as Leila in a story that follows her from her childhood through her teenage years to adulthood in a story of family, relationships and memory — it's also a gentle descent into the surreal. As you explore the game, time begins to warp, reality distorts, and Leila's memories come alive as interactive vignettes that feel more like weird dreams than progressive gameplay.
The game’s mechanics are minimalist: move forward, interact, and occasionally solve environmental puzzles that never overstay their welcome. There' s an "assistance" tab in the top left that may or may not help you solve a puzzle should you get stuck, but the help is often extremely subtle, nudging you in the right direction rather than offering an immediate solution.
For me, Leila's real hook is the emotional storytelling, which unfolds through voice-over journals, ghostly echoes, and Leila’s inner monologue. There are no combat sequences, no fail states, no roguelike — just a hauntingly immersive journey through the psyche of shock, betrayal, grief, sadness and acceptance, the stages of which can seemingly be played in any order.
Graphically, without doing anything amazing, Leila looks nice, with its hand-painted backdrops and a color palette that shifts subtly with the story’s emotional beats. The sound design is of a similar standard, with ambient wind, distant waves, and a piano-driven score that hits harder than you'd expect.
Leila has a few flaws, its main flaw is its tendency to wander towards the obliquely surreal during puzzles, making some of them too obscure for my liking. Another problem is the game's point & click nature not being well-suited to an Xbox controller. Although the cursor movement is well optimised for console, the cursor/pointer itself is tiny and doesn't react in any way when you pass over an interactive object (it's actually difficult to see sometimes on a 50" TV!) meaning there's an awful lot of "clicking" on the scenery trying to find usable items. Given the fact that there is absolutely no way you're going to get all the achievements/trophies on a single playthrough (if at all), a chapter select would have been an intelligent addition too. The final issue is its brevity, coming in at 3-4 hours (and I got stuck on a couple of puzzles!)
In the end, Leila isn’t trying to be all things to all gamers, it’s trying to be a new spin on a classic genre, to be true to itself, and true to Leila and her story. And in that, it succeeds, Some might crave more complexity or gameplay depth, but for those drawn to narrative-rich experiences, its focus on Leila's inner thoughts are part of the charm, I'm just not sure who a game about a woman's coming of age and adult problems is aimed at, or of there's even a market for it, even at its bargain basement price of £10.74...
Many thanks to Ubik Studios for the review code.