The Almost Gone A life in dioramas

This is detective work at the scale of a dollhouse. Every scene is a small, fixed world you can turn on its axis, and the truth hides in the corners: a number scratched on the underside of an object, a code that only makes sense once you have turned an item all the way around, a door you only spot from one angle. You search forensically, room by room, and each clue you decipher opens the path forward and adds a piece to the story. Nothing shouts at you. The game trusts you to look closely, and the reward for looking closely is understanding.

The settings are ordinary until they are not. You move from an unassuming sitting room to eerily deserted streets, from neat apartment blocks to an abandoned hospital, past a tent in a forest and a police car sitting in a tree. Each place is rendered as a clean, geometric diorama, bright and stylized at first glance, with something darker spreading underneath. The contrast is the point: the prettier the little world, the more unsettling it feels when you notice what is wrong with it.

Across five chapters, the game hands you fragments: objects, memories, glimpses of the people who surrounded you. Written by award-winning author Joost Vandecasteele, it deals with death, loss and mental health, and it tells its story through what you find rather than through long conversations. The ending is deliberately open: the pieces are there, but the game leaves room for your own reading of what happened. Some players find that haunting, others wish it were more concrete, so come for the atmosphere and the piecing-together more than for a tidy resolution.