Tulpa

I have a soft spot for games that lean hard on a single, strange idea and build an entire world around it, and Tulpa is exactly that kind of game. You guide two characters through a wordless surreal landscape: Ophelia, a young woman who will literally shatter like glass if she grows too distressed, and Oliver, her phantom companion who can fly, pull levers, and move objects she cannot physically reach. The core tension comes from keeping them close. Stray too far apart and both characters start to fracture, pushing you to think about proximity and sequencing at the same time you are solving whatever spatial puzzle sits in front of you. It is a quietly clever design hook, and the few hours it runs feel shaped around it with care. The world itself shifts through distinct color chapters, cycling from cold blue-black silhouettes into jarring reds and lurid greens, each zone carrying its own mythological or horror-inflected imagery. Hanging figures, spiked pits, enormous monstrous beings that function less as enemies and more as environmental punctuation. The visual language borrows Limbo's minimalist silhouette grammar but adds color washes that give Tulpa its own identity. The soundtrack starts in near-silence and builds incrementally as things grow stranger, which is exactly the kind of intentional audio design I want more developers to try. When Ophelia's heartbeat quickens because Oliver has drifted a step too far, the sound design is doing real emotional work. The puzzle design, though, is where things get uneven. Some of the challenges are elegantly logical, classic adventure-game puzzles reframed in surreal clothing: Tower of Hanoi variants, music-mimicry sequences, lever-and-block arrangements. Others communicate their solutions poorly, leaving you clicking at objects in the dark until something responds. There is no hint system, no in-game text beyond the opening control tutorial, and no second solution to any given puzzle. When you are stuck, you are genuinely stuck. The platforming side has its own friction: Ophelia handles slowly, jump inputs occasionally misfire, and some ledge grabs require precision the controls do not quite reward. None of it is a dealbreaker, but it is worth knowing before you sit down. At roughly three hours for a full run, Tulpa knows its length and does not overstay. That is a quality I respect in small games. It tells a story entirely through imagery and movement, never spelling out what Ophelia and Oliver mean to each other or what this world represents, and that restraint is either the thing that hooks you or the thing that loses you within the first fifteen minutes. If you are the kind of player who finds meaning in silence and trusts the images to carry weight, the ambiguity reads as poetry. If you need narrative anchors, the blankness will frustrate. Steam's "Mostly Positive" rating across a small sample of reviews reflects that honest split in the audience.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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