While working on his new game, a point-and-click adventure called Memoranda, lead developer Sahand Saedi kept a stack of books written by Japanese author Haruki Murakami next to his bed. When he would get stuck on an aspect of the game’s design — whether it was crafting a puzzle or figuring out the story — he would pick up a book at random and read for a bit, looking for inspiration. “I was usually lucky and was able to connect things together with one line of dialog or a small puzzle,” he says.

Memoranda is launching later this month, and the game is inspired in large part Murakami’s stories. The game centers on a young woman in a vaguely European town who has lost her memory — she doesn’t even remember her name. (The title, Memoranda, refers to the sticky notes she uses to remind herself of important things.) It plays out like a classic adventure game along the lines of Day of the Tentacle or The Secret of Monkey Island, so you’ll spend much of your time chatting with other characters and solving puzzles using items you collect around town.

The setting and story don’t necessarily call to mind any particular Murakami story, instead they’re aiming to evoke a similar feeling. Memoranda takes place in a quaint town, complete with charming little cafes and bakeries. It’s all rendered in a fluid art style reminiscent of a French animated movie. But there’s clearly something more at play in this world, and that feeling is something that Saedi was looking to pull from Murakami’s work, in particular short stories from collections like The Elephant Vanishes.

“Most of the short stories by Murakami happen in a very calm and realistic setting and the introduction of a strange and unexpected character or a small event will break the atmosphere and change everything. Suspense and fright are very clear elements that have been ingrained in my mind while reading Murakami’s stories,” Saedi explains. “These feelings, and also Murakami’s knowledge about music and many aspects of technology, made me think that a videogame can be made by combining them.”

“I probably could not have made any other type of game.”

When you play Memoranda, those small surreal moments start to appear almost immediately. There’s an item that will disappear from your inventory and mysteriously appear back where you found it, and at one point you’ll come across a missing person’s poster that features both a human and a humanoid elephant. These moments are both jarring and familiar; they’re weird, but small enough that they don’t necessarily feel completely out of place.

Saedi found this sense of strangeness a perfect fit for an adventure game, a genre that’s already home to surreal experiences like the classic Grim Fandango, or more recently, titles like Botanicula or Broken Age. It also happened to be Saedi’s favorite genre, and was the only kind of game he played when he was younger. “I probably could not have made any other type of game,” he says.

Aside from his personal preferences, the theme and genre also had some practical benefits. For one, adventure games are defined in part by their item-based puzzles, which often don’t make much real-world sense. A more surreal setting provides plenty of opportunity to make these puzzles more interesting and distinct, without feeling out of place. The Murakami vibe also helped define the main character and her quest to rediscover her identity. “I think the only good genre for Murakami stories is the adventure genre since most of his characters are seeking something internal or external,” Saedi explains, “and this suits very well with adventure games.”

I’ve played the first few hours of Memoranda, and from what I’ve seen it definitely manages to capture that dreamlike quality of Murakami’s fiction. The world is mostly normal, until you run across something small that feels off, creating a sense that there are maybe darker secrets hiding if you probe further. It also feels a lot like classic adventure games, right down to how your inventory works and the often confusing puzzles you’ll come up against. Memoranda doesn’t feature any type of modern hint system, which means you’ll need to use a combination of environmental clues and experimentation to make it through the game. It also means you’ll likely find yourself stuck more than a few times.

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015, Memoranda is set to launch on PC and Mac on January 25th. For Saedi, he hopes the game will have a relatively wide appeal, working for both fans of the author who inspired Memoranda, as well as those who love a good, old-school adventure game. That said, he’s not quite sure how he feels about the potential for Murakami himself to play it. “This is one of those stressful things that I try not to think about much,” Saedi says.