Core loops:
Players take on the role of a girl who falls asleep at her desk on a sunny afternoon. Players spend most of their time navigating her layered dreams and memories, solving visual puzzles by changing their perspective. Players guide the girl’s consciousness with her imaginary friend ‘Cutty’ through a tranquil environment, searching for a path to either the “exit” or the “clue” while collecting CDs and deciphering fragmented memories. At the “Level-garden,” the boundary between dream and reality, players make choices to return to reality and unlock different endings.
Mechanics:
First/Third-person exploration: Freely walk and observe in a 3D environment without combat or time pressure.
Three skills:
- Zoom in: Use a “magnifying glass” to focus and see minute details overlooked in the environment.
- Perspective switching: By “crouching” or changing the viewing angle, see through visual illusions and discover hidden paths or information.
- Sound resonance: Adjust the frequency of an old-fashioned radio to influence the environment with specific sound frequencies (e.g., clearing murky water) or distinguish key memory echoes from noise.
Memory fragment collection: Interact with misplaced old objects in the environment to trigger distorted audiovisual fragments, serving as a primary source of narrative.
Skill fusion puzzle solving: In the mid-game, puzzles require players to combine two or all three skills to solve.
Choices: At key junctures (such as the “Memory Garden”), players must make choices based on emotional inclinations (e.g., which symbolic plant to revive). These choices affect the tone of the final ending and the presentation of a core memory.
Ultimately: At the end of the game, all external tools are stripped away, and players can only rely on the “insight and intuition” they have cultivated throughout their journey to interact with the environment and make the final choices that affect the game’s ending.
Constraints:
- Tools Bound to Context: The ‘magnifying glass’and ‘radio’are only effective in specific dream layers (level 1-5). In the final “Real Bedroom” layer, these tools are forcibly removed.
- Perspective: During puzzle solving module, perspective switching is limited to a few observation modes triggered by preset actions such as crouching and fixed in first-person perspectives, and some times only can use ‘Cutty’view. Players cannot freely manipulate them for shortcuts.
- Ambiguous and Non-linear Information: The collected “memory fragments” do not provide a clear narrative; players must actively associate and interpret them. The game itself does not provide clear guidance on “puzzle completion” or “storyline.”
- Path and Choice: The game’s spatial structure is generally progressive, so returning to a completed level incurs a cost (consuming cooldowns) and affects the collection of endings. Choices made in Level-Garden and Real-Bedroom are irreversible, directly locking in the ending branch.