Puzzles and Motherhood – Leila Review

The throughline of Leila becomes obvious within the first few minutes: Leila is like any of us, facing the struggles of a life that didn’t go as expected, making mistakes in moments of weakness that accumulate over time, and the inevitable moment of reconciliation or breaking. Told via a hand-drawn 2D point-and-click puzzler, Leila is the story of a woman who weaves her childhood, her young motherhood, and her late adulthood together as inseparable pieces of a whole life. 

From the beginning, Leila muses about the scrutiny of motherhood despite it being supposedly inherent and imposes a resistance against using aging as an excuse for ignorance. She considers the contrast of parenting being defined by being needed by someone else for so long only to have to rediscover your own identity once that time has largely passed, and her own daughter’s avoidance of having kids as an issue of ethics.

We exist in a weird time and place to talk about Motherhood, considering the personal freedom to be or not to be one is constantly in flux and at risk. Even putting such a focus on that part of Leila denies the conceit of it – she was never supposed to only be a mother, no one is. Though, it’s hard not to centralize it. I grew up knowing that I didn’t want to be one, and that knowing has only ever been reinforced as I’ve grown older. My reasons are mostly practical, and as Leila’s own daughter remarks, with the world as it is, with things like climate change and the ever-growing economic disparity, why would I want to bring a new life into it? I like instead to watch Motherhood from a distance. There’s a thousand good reasons to go either way, and Leila tells a remarkably poignant story of motherhood as both a pitfall of her life as a whole person and her ultimate reassurance that, from the outsider’s perspective, is grounded and relatable. It’s really beautiful.
   
Leila isn’t just a nice story either. One of the most striking things about it is the art style, bright and sketchy at times, very classic point-and-click, becoming slightly more polished and realistic as the situation demands. One of my favorite scenes of the entire game is Leila floating on the water, reminiscing on all of the directions she wanted or thought her life would go, and then sinking beneath the water. Like Ophelia, serene and melancholy. Other scenes are displayed like backdrops of a play, traversing down a path through woods styled like layers of a pop-up book, or the manuscript-style depiction of the Persian story Layla and Majnun. 

The narrative dances around the issues of motherhood to the more granular anxieties most people have: feeling out of time and place, feeling like we won’t grow up ourselves until we have children (or rather, that being the outcome of the expectation that society puts on childless people), wanting to be everything, but being too assumptive we’ll succeed at nothing that we become stagnant. Ouch. 

Nestled between her childhood and adulthood, Leila deals with conventional teenage angst: homework and generational pressure and having a boyfriend who doesn’t care about you as much as you care about him. Trying to find a direction for your identity in books and hobbies and Marcus Aurelius quotes. Learning which masks you’re going to wear – the discarding of which involves ripping her face off entirely and piecing it back together as a small memory puzzle, a notion of sometimes having to remember who the real You is. The sting of shame and rejection manifesting as crawling under her own skin and becoming a seed that blossoms into a laughing flower – the sentiment that we can grow and thrive in spite of (or sometimes thanks) to the trials and traumas of a complicated adolescence.

Most of the puzzles are appropriately related either functionally or thematically to the narrative, all of them at least properly enmeshed in the setting, and all of them relatively easy (the metric I’m using is Me, who puzzles at, generously, about a sixth grade level), though sometimes the pieces of certain puzzles aren’t clearly defined. At times the puzzles feel more like a plain point-and-click, but otherwise they’re a clever device to move the story along. 

For example: one puzzle has the player moving Leila’s joints to contort her body in a box to reach the key to a dollhouse, and what she thinks is the safe, ideal option for life – husband, home, and child. In the desperate journey to rediscover what it means to live for herself, she cheats on her husband and damages the bond between them. But these scenes inside the dollhouse also reflect the effect that the drudgery of her routine – once a source of safety – has had on her. Her dollhouse life is once bright, the tasks quick, then later dark and stormy, with tasks taking longer, if they get done at all. 

The cleaning tasks involved a lot of small, repetitive back-and-forth movements using the mouse, and I genuinely had my hand cramp up during these moments. They would have been more effective if the earlier cleaning bits didn’t also take so long, but at this point in the story my hand was definitely hurting. It’s nothing if not an adequate translation of how hard these things become when you no longer have your heart in anything. If that was the intention, hell yeah, but be warned by this: if you’ve got sensitive hands, be ready to struggle a little. 

There’s another story within Leila – Layla and Majnun, a Persian poem about passionate but forbidden love, with puzzles connected to each arc: love, separation, reunion. It culminates in a scene about her affair – or rather, the consequence of it presented in abstraction – and I’ll admit I struggle to find the throughlines between the themes of the poem and what seemed like a random after-hours quickie with a barista. Perhaps it’s the disjointed presentation – in that you can choose to back away from parts of her life to explore other parts in the meantime – or the constraints of my own perspective. Regardless, this real-life representation of the character’s culture is interesting.    

The story ends with the strengthening of her connection with her daughter, but more importantly her connection with herself. She goes through the daily tasks that bring her peace and comfort, and connects with the world again. She sees her own life reflected in her neighbors, and finds community with the other women of her neighborhood. They sit around the fire and have a little moment of ritualistic whimsy, becoming a little bestial in their freedom, a tableau of unrestricted womanhood traditionally considered taboo. 

Mandy Zines and Ari Trash do a great job voicing adult and young Leila, respectively. Their comforting and organic performances might be too candid for some players, but I like the emotional quality of an imperfect performance, especially for a game that’s so singularly focused on one woman’s life.

Overall, though the narrative could be stronger, it tells the story it wanted to. The dialogue supports it in an unrefined way that reflects how people actually talk about themselves, and it allows Leila to dive deeper into herself and her subconscious. It feels like a long therapy session wherein she comes upon a breakthrough; meandering but not exhaustive. 

I will say, there are fundamental strings of Leila’s life introduced in the beginning that could be explored a little more, a little deeper. Not even in the way I sometimes want simply more of a game – this narrative would benefit specifically from elaborating her childhood. Leila’s main wounds were obvious, but the puzzle attached to that era of her life felt like something cluttered for the sake of being cluttered. As soon as we get a glimpse of her relationship with her father, we’ve moved on to the next phase of her life. Her affair, initially presented as a complicated moment of her life but not quite the central point of this examination ritual, seems much more important by the end, and yet the outcome isn’t clear. As is, Leila still works as a short, evocative, sometimes ambiguous narrative about a woman with a unique yet relatable life story who finds a way to make sense of it all. 

And while I hold that view of the narrative, I also accept the angle that we aren’t always able to dig into the formative events of our lives as deeply as we want to, and instead we have to make sense of the pieces. For how short it is, Leila does well with the pieces, and makes a satisfying enough ending out of them.