Leila

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Leila, released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, is a game that combines Puzzle game elements with some light Walking Simulator elements to present players with a story about a woman using a Virtual Reality device to explore her life and revisit past frustrations and traumas.

The presentation in this game is gorgeous, with beautiful hand-drawn 2D art that’s well-animated and has a lot of personality. This is backed by a really excellent soundtrack with a good variety of songs, with some really nice lo-fi beats that make this a nice relaxed experience, though at times the game’s content can be somewhat disturbing.

All of this is joined by some very good sound design, and voiced narration that works well enough, though I don’t really know exactly who the game’s titular character is speaking to. It doesn’t seem to be to herself, to an in-game character, or even to the player, really. She just sort of rambles on in a way that sometimes relates to the scene in question, and sometimes seems abstract in a way that’s hard to interpret in a meaningful way.

This sorta’ matches what we see in the story itself, as it jumps back and forth through Leila’s life, from childhood to adulthood, with Leila making connections between earlier traumas and later behaviors but not really fleshing out how one led to the other.

Interspersed between these moments we have occasional puzzles, and these vary between different types, including hidden object-style puzzles, linking line-style puzzles, and a Tower of Hanoi-style puzzle. Many of these have interesting twists to them to keep them from retreading ground we’ve seen in countless games before, making these puzzles take on a new dimension.

Then you get other puzzles that don’t really fit into standard puzzle types, and at times it’s unclear what the game even expects from the player. There’s a hint button, but sometimes this is deactivated, and sometimes the hint it gives you doesn’t really answer the question of what you’re being asked to do, in a way that’s really frustrating.

In the end, I really wanted to like Leila more due to its outstanding presentation, but the gameplay itself was a mixed bag, and the way the story was constructed made it difficult for me to feel invested in Leila or her non-sequential retelling of her life story. I think what’s here is interesting and beautiful enough to entice puzzle fans with enough patience to get through moments of confusion, but otherwise I think there are other games in the genre more worthy of checking out.

tl;dr – Leila is a Puzzle game about a woman exploring the difficult moments in her life through a sort of virtual reality device. The presentation here is gorgeous, but the puzzles vary from clever to frustrating, and the story itself is difficult to get invested in. I think patient Puzzle game fans may find the presentation beautiful enough to work through the more frustrating parts of the game, but most players will be better off looking elsewhere.

Grade: C+

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