MyDear.exe is a love letter to 57 years, out 2 November

MyDear.exe is what two veterans of The Rogue Prince of Persia built when they decided to make something you can finish over a cup of tea. Falling Leaves Studio, a four-person outfit in Bordeaux, has confirmed that its first game arrives on 2 November 2026 for Steam and the Epic Games Store, and the demo that has been sitting on Steam since April is currently carrying a 100 per cent positive rating from the 28 people who have reviewed it.

What Ellie is actually playing

You play as Ellie, sitting down at the old family computer to play a game her husband Lucien built for her. The occasion is 57 years of marriage. What he made is not a shooter or a platformer; it is a fake Windows XP-inspired desktop, and the things he wants to tell her are filed away inside it. Photographs, drawings and notes are scattered through the folders, and the passwords, puzzles and narrative mini-games he left behind are the only way to reach them. Falling Leaves says the finished game runs about two hours, is fully voiced, and includes two pets worth meeting: Clochette the street cat and Hoshisan, described by the studio as a good boy.

The structure is the interesting part. Falling Leaves calls it a Foldervania, and the coinage holds up: it takes the non-linear, backtrack-heavy exploration of a Metroidvania and drops it into the directory tree of a mid-2000s PC. Where a traditional metroidvania gates progress behind a new ability, this one gates it behind understanding, because a password can only be decrypted once you have found the right photograph, the right note or the right daft mini-game. Steam lists the game for Windows and macOS only, and its tags run from narrative and puzzle to 1990s and retro. Two hours of game built by roughly four people is also a deliberate rejection of the industry habit of selling length by the hour.

Small games are cheap to make and brutally hard to make well, because there is nowhere to hide. A two-hour experience has to earn every one of its 120 minutes, and a fake desktop is precisely the kind of frame that collapses the moment the puzzles inside it turn out to be filler. The studio also states outright on its store page that no AI-generated assets were used, which in 2026 reads as a positioning choice as much as a technical one.

Our opinion

There is real craft in choosing a fake operating system as the setting for a love story, because a desktop is where the mundane evidence of a shared life actually accumulates: the folder nobody tidied, the draft nobody deleted, the photograph nobody has opened since 2004. That is a sharper idea than most games with three times the budget manage, and it is why a two-hour running time here reads as confidence rather than a limitation.

So play the demo before you get excited, not after. It is free, it runs on a laptop, and twenty minutes of it will tell you whether Foldervania is a design philosophy or a marketing word. A perfect demo score from 28 reviewers is a hunch, not evidence. But if the structure holds, 2 November is a suspiciously cheap price of entry for exactly the sort of small, personal game the industry claims to miss.