Preview: Leila – Into an Everyday Woman’s Psyche
If most adventures in video games take you out and about into exotic locales, Leila instead uses the adventure game medium to offer you a different perspective altogether. The adventure here takes you deep into the protagonist’s psyche, through the pivotal moments of the life of an ordinary woman.
Illustrated with handcrafted, traditionally-created art, Leila blends emotional storytelling with puzzles that’ll get you scratching the other side of your brain. As you decipher the pieces of Leila’s past, you’ll come to learn the reasons for her decisions, and uncover more and more of her past.
This short adventure comes to us from Türkiye-based Ubik Studios, which was founded in Istanbul in 2022. The team started out with only 3 members at first, but now sports 10 members as its game nears release.
When we caught up with Nihan İşler, the game’s creative director, she described the game’s development team as ‘emotional’, and expressed that the teams wants to ‘make people empathize and touch their hearts’ with the games they develop.
Leila clocks in at about 3 hours for a single playthrough, which are packed with puzzles, hand-drawn art, English and Turkish voice acting, and even high-quality animated cinematics.
When we asked Ubik Studios for the game’s inspirations and ideas, we learnt that the team’s core idea was to make something that would make people feel less alone when they played it. Through the concept of an ordinary life story, the team hopes that players ‘would feel understood when they see in the game the things they think but don’t express’.
Leila releases on April 7th, 2025 for PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Switch. Apart from its voiced language options English and Turkish, the game will also feature text localisation support for Russian, French, Latin American Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Ukrainian, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
For more information on the game, check out its official website here. You’ll find the game on Steam here.
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Originally posted by intoindiegames.com
