Path to Mnemosyne, an esoteric puzzle game featuring gorgeous hand-drawn grayscale art, is coming to the App Store. And it’s a doozy.

Having previously made waves on Steam in late 2018, in addition to launches on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, the critically acclaimed game’s forthcoming arrival on iOS will open it up to a whole new audience. If David Lynch made an iOS game it would probably look a lot like this.

Path to Mnemosyne is a short, but compelling gaming experience. You play the role of an unnamed patient who must try to uncover memories after what appears to be a traumatic incident.

What follows is a strange, Lynchian trip down memory lane that will confuse, occasionally frustrate, but ultimately leave you feeling like you’ve played a totally new kind of puzzle game. That’s a good thing.

“I have been asked a lot of times what kind of game is Path to Mnemosyne and to tell the truth I actually never know what to answer,” David Ferriz, co-founder of Spanish games studio DevilishGames, which created the game, told Cult of Mac. “Initially we approached it as a graphic adventure and included the ingredients that we thought were necessary, [such as] story, hidden hints, puzzles, [and that sort of thing]. We tried to avoid using enemies, cliffs or any other element that could ‘kill’ the main character. But as development advanced, the game took its own shape and transformed into something difficult to classify by standard genres.”

Not an easy game to define — or forget

Many creators would like their works not to fit neatly into a particular genre, of course. In the case of Path to Mnemosyne, however, Ferriz may be exactly right. In the game, the player moves back and forth along an infinite path. This changing road represents various memories. It’s a trippy, Freudian game with an unreliable narrator and no shortage of weird dreamlike images. Along the way, you solve an assortment of puzzles. This is packaged in a beautifully hand-crafted style that will make the game stay with you.

Although the port to iOS has taken a while, Ferriz said that it has not posed too many difficulties. The version of Path to Mnemosyne coming to the App Store is very much in line with the desktop version of the game which launched in fall 2018.

“Even if the game has already appeared on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, the original version was the one for PC that was launched on Steam,” Ferriz said. “In this version, many of the puzzles were controlled by mouse, so the move to touchscreens has not been too complicated. Furthermore, Apple devices are becoming more and more powerful, so the game works as smoothly or better than in consoles. In fact, the port has been quite easy, and the gameplay is intact.”

Path to Mnemosyne: One for fans of quirky puzzle games

Giving away too many details will spoil the game experience. If you’re someone who enjoys seeing quirky independent games in the App Store, and maybe enjoyed the strange hallucinogenic quality of a classic iOS title like Monument Valley, this is definitely worth checking out.

Path to Mnemosyne launches in the App Store on March 11. It is currently available for pre-order, priced at $4.99.