By Shayn Elliott

Published November 23, 2024

Who’s Lila? is listed on Steam as a point-and-click adventure. It was developed by Garage Heathen, a one-man developer from Russia, who describes his work as “surreal lo-fi horror”, which I believe is a more apt description for this game.

This is a spoiler-free review. As such, at times it will seem vague. Full disclosure, I wasn’t very excited about playing the game at first, and hit a point of frustration early on, but after I got past that, and saw what the game had to offer, I was hooked. I played for hours, and totally fell in love with this game. I can’t wait to play more.

It’s hard to talk about the story of Who’s Lila? without spoiling the game, but I’ll try.

Before I start on the story, I think it’s important to note that, to get more of the story and lore, you need to examine as many things as you can in your surroundings, and talk to as many characters as you can.

You play a young man called William, who gets up one day, practices facial expressions in the mirror, and takes out some trash before going to school. Probably the kind of morning you, a totally normal human, also experience. Just kidding, William is a weirdo, and so are you, probably.

While at school, you soon realize that something is wrong: Your friend Tanya is missing, and everyone is acting like it’s your fault. It’s up to you to figure out what’s going on, and what happened to your friend. To this end, you talk to many characters, explore the school, and catch the bus to multiple other locations, which you can also explore to varying degrees. As you dig deeper, you discover confusion, horror, beauty, and sometimes even your end.

Speaking of ends…There are 16 endings. Some of them come quickly, others take longer, but all of them are part of the larger story. This is probably my favorite part of the game. The storytelling is non-linear, and the end is not the end, not really. The end is just another part of the larger story, which you discover as you try and try again, and succeed and fail. Every path shares something of the story and lore with you.

I highly recommend this game, for the story and storytelling method alone.

Who’s Lila? is a point-and-click game. The camera is usually third-person, fixed perspective. Interestingly, this game is presented in a split screen, with the left side displaying William’s full body in his environment, and the right side displaying either William’s face or the face of the person with whom you’re speaking during dialogs.

The left side of the screen is where you navigate and interact with objects of interest and non-player characters. For me, this was fairly intuitive, but took some getting used to, especially when the camera would change in certain environments. I spent a fair bit of time at first clicking around trying to get William to walk where I wanted him to.

The right side of the screen is where the most important and the most unique mechanic is showcased: changing William’s facial expressions. You click and drag various points on his face to accomplish smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, etc. in an attempt to produce a convincing and appropriate facial expression for each situation. This occurs during dialog sequences. It is not always clear which facial expression is the “right” one, nor is it likely that you will produce what a human would consider a “normal” expression, and at times it can be pretty funny what you wind up with after click-dragging William’s face into submission.

There was one section in particular I struggled with, when a set of two specific facial expressions were required to progress, and the game offered me no hints as to what they could be. I had to look it up.

Overall, I found the gameplay to be serviceable on the left side of the screen, and quite enjoyable on the right side of the screen.

Something I found particularly well done is the combined effect of the sound and visuals, not only to set the general tone, but to effect sudden and impactful changes in tone, often when you least expect it.

For example, in William’s apartment, after you’ve practiced his expressions in the mirror and return to the main room, the phone rings. But the phone doesn’t just ring. The music stops, and the view shifts to a close-up of the phone. The view darkens as the phone begins to ring and a disconcerting sound plays. The view quickly switches back to the normal environment and the music resumes. This is a mild example of a technique used at various points throughout the game to affect the player’s emotional state. There’s another scene where this technique is used that had me genuinely panicking, yelling “no, no, no!” as I desperately tried to change the expression on William’s stupid face (I was unsuccessful).

The art style can be described as impressionistic rather than realistic, utilizing a simple color palate (one color, with varying degrees of brightness). Something about it reminds me of MS Paint from the late 90s, with a hint of ASCII art, though it is neither of those things. The character design is at times almost cartoonish, and at other times unsettlingly realistic, even approaching the uncanny valley at various points.

The unique and lo-fi visuals can create a learning curve. In the first thirty minutes of playing, I kept getting lost—well, it’s hard to get “lost”, really, but I felt lost—and I couldn’t tell the characters apart in the left side of the screen. The facial expressions that I managed to wrastle William’s face into were usually either grotesque or silly.

That being said, once you get used to the visual style, it’s perfect. It goes a long way toward conveying the tone, and supplies the player with genuine moments of shock, tension, unease, beauty, and an overarching surrealism that is difficult to describe.

The sound in Who’s Lila? is, like the rest of the game, notable. While not quite as strikingly unique as some of the other elements, it nonetheless fits with the rest to complete the tone and elicit genuine emotional responses. At times uplifting music plays gently in the background while you struggle to walk around, and at other times strangely distorted versions of normal ambient sound buffet your ears while you struggle to walk around. Other times, there is silence.

There are times when shocking, surprising, or even disturbing noises occur. The only voices I’ve heard in the game are memorable in a sleep-paralysis sort of way, and there are certain scenes where the sounds really got under my skin. I’d love to describe it in more detail, but I don’t want to spoil anything.

I loved this game, as you can tell. It was well worth the $12.00USD. In fact, I would have been happy with it if I’d spent double that.

If varied gameplay mechanics and high-fidelity graphics are your must-haves in a game, you probably won’t like it. If story and tone are your highest priority, then this is a must play. For everyone else in the middle, I’d say it’s worth a try, especially at the price point.