The critically acclaimed psychological adventure game Trauma finally came out earlier this year, as a free-to-play browser game as well as a paid app for Mac OS. This week it became one of the top ten paid apps. The game is about searching through the memories of a patient suffering from mental trauma, by piecing together places and events from a series of connected photographs. It’s a unique and rich aesthetic experience, though as a whole project it still feels unfinished.

The main problem is the narrative element of the game. The cut scenes are pretty, but they aren’t illuminating enough to keep you playing for long, which is unfortunate given that the setting makes you expect a dark and brooding storyline to unfold. I realised all too late when I finally completed the game that the big reveal was never going to happen - we never were going to learn what the patient’s lost memories had been all along, but were simply left with the knowledge that she had recovered from her illness.

Trauma isn’t a game design marvel, but it is a very exciting experiment into a new way of visualising player interface with a game world. The world of Trauma is not an objective reality, but a mental picture held in a disturbed mind. The image is incomplete, although you do slowly flesh it out, and the landscape is marked by photographic effects that visually overlay the psychogeographic significance of memory. The artful variation on the point-and-click adventure game mechanic puts the player in a disembodied derive. The psychogeographical effect of Trauma’s design is heightened by the voice of the patient, tired and woeful, who sometimes drives you forwards and sometimes puts you in doubt about your direction of enquiry.

Most exciting is the way that the game creates a space composed of layered images. I believe that a lot of 3D video games possess an exciting tension between screen composition and space design. Valve are particularly good at mobilising this, creating game worlds that are made up of a series of stunningly composed photographs through which player movement feels open but is in fact carefully directed. In a way, Trauma takes the opposite approach - rather than creating a full 3D world that is arranged with photographic sensibilities, Trauma presents itself as a series of photographs that, surprisingly, end up feeling like a bounded space for directed movement. The tension between screenness and spaciousness is turned on its head.

I have a lot of reservations about laying too much praise on this game, because the ending was so disappointing. My partner and I had been playing it together, and we were left feeling a little bit robbed of our time. Nevertheless, the aesthetic experience shows a huge amount of promise, and was thoroughly inspiring to me as someone who intends to spend the next few years or more studying game world design. Something artful has been crafted here that challenges our interface with virtual worlds. It pushes the medium beyond virtual materiality and begins to hint at the possibilities for epistemological simulation in digital games. That’s incredibly exciting.