I lost my dad last year to pneumonia and dementia, which were exacerbated by a fall six months earlier that damaged his brain. I’ve always been interested in learning about brain change, but that experience forced me into a rapid learning routine to understand how to help someone going through brain change. Since then, I’ve been curious about art forms that explore brain change in various guises, and that leads us to EMERGE.
EMERGE is the latest game from the man behind the superb meditation game Playne, and it is what I’d call “emotional jigasaw puzzling”. We play as Maya, an 80-year-old lady who is in cognitive decline and has forgotten most of her life. Through conversations with her cat Luna, she starts to piece together key memories throughout her life by completing a jigsaw puzzle. Once completed, they unlock three key memories, and they become pages in her diary. It is a lovely way to explain how brain change works, and EMERGE uses its visuals and gameplay to explore the theme.
Each jigsaw is broken up into tiny squares. Those squares are all refracted and distorted using visual filters, decolourisation, watercolour staining, and all kinds of weirdness. You’ll pick up the squares and drop them into place, usually rotating them to match the distorted image you have before you. This unveils a section of the real picture underneath, which has some similarities to the distorted image, but is shrouded in mental fog. It’s a bit like playing the TV Show Catchphrase, where you’ll guess what the real picture is underneath. This is made harder because each picture is a surrealist take on the memory. Doors are opening on a street. Fish are swimming around the living room.
To help you, there are three power-ups to rotate your current square the right way, or show you where the square could either go exactly, or into one of five choices. These run on a cooldown, which can be improved by spending memory shards (your score) in between levels. You can also spend your memory shards repopulating Maya’s room. Doing so increases the amount of memory shards you gain per correct square placed, and also the length of time a combo meter (called Flow State in-game) lasts. Again, this is a great visualisation of how a person with brain failure sees the world as their view becomes so narrow. It works so well as a visual cue.
EMERGE does lots of things right, but I have a couple of minor gripes. The first one could well be my fault. To rotate the squares to match the frame, you’ll need to use your mouse wheel. I found this overly sensitive and difficult to control, and would prefer the option to rebind this to a keyboard key. Maybe my mouse is just rubbish, though (or my fingers too fat). The other minor niggle came from some of the artwork being either singular squares of pure white or black, or colours matching so closely to the backdrop. This either makes knowing what orientation you’ve got the square in and tried difficult, or it’s visually tricky to separate what you’ve filled in against the picture you are uncovering. To combat that, some lines cut across the images – and these do help to fill in some gaps. I’d have appreciated a little more contrast in some places. Zoom features are here, but the reliance on mouse controls to pan the camera makes the view feel slightly drunk. On a positive note, I was thankful the developer put a message directly into the game menu confirming the images are not created using generative AI. Everything is made by humans, it just adopts that AI style.
For me, EMERGE is a game that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. I wanted to help Maya rediscover her life, learn more about her, and recolour and populate her world again. The jigsaw puzzles are good, the art is a little off the wall in places, and there is a positive element to a situation where happy days are rare. This is one for the thoughtful players.
Review copy provided by the developer. EMERGE is out now on PC.
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