Almost all of the game takes place in Alex's apartment, viewed from a first-person perspective. You'll spend much of your time at her desk, where you can interact with all the surrounding objects -- chief among them a computer. You use this computer to investigate the aforementioned tiles, digging into the conspiracy theories that surround them. But it's around the fringes of this "central" plot that the real meat of this game lies, where you'll be able to dig into Alex's condition and rebuild relationships with Alex's loved ones.

What you do with your time inside Alex's body is up to you. Agianniotakis describes The Circle as "the smallest narrative sandbox." The game runs the course of a year, during which the narrative unfolds organically. Alex is a fully shaped character, so you can't exactly dictate what she does, but many interactions are optional. You can't decide, for example, how exactly to respond to an email from Alex's mother, but you can choose whether or not to respond to it -- or even whether you want to read the email in the first place.

How you choose to spend your time in the game will dictate how well you understand Alex and her troubles. You can pursue the Toynbee Tile mystery resolutely, ignoring the realities of PTSD and hiding from your family as best you can; you can reach out to your concerned loved ones and try to repair those broken bonds; or anything in between.

As interesting as the narrative sandbox is, it isn't what made the game special for me. Instead, it's the way Agianniotakis uses VR's strengths and weaknesses to help you embody Alex, and understand her frustrations and feelings. One example in the demo I played at the EGX game show was a phone call Alex received.

Or rather, didn't receive. You play the game seated, and at one point a phone begins to ring. Using 3D audio effects, it's easy to locate the phone: on the floor, just to your right. Retrieving the handset is impossible, though. It's carefully positioned to be just out of your grasp, no matter how hard you try to lean and reach, and the call goes to voicemail. Alex's mother's voice plays. She's worried.

Another, more subtle, tactic employs one of VR's long-perceived weaknesses: inducing motion sickness. The game is punctuated by dream sequences, panic attacks and memories, in which Alex moves on a guided path through abstract vignettes related to her trauma. One such scene tackles her ongoing gender dysphoria. Shown from a third-person perspective, it sees Alex walk past silhouettes in a public bathroom -- often a fraught place for a trans person to be.

During the sequence, I felt lightheaded, and a little uneasy. It wasn't just from the challenging narrative, Agianniotakis explained: "I'm using the discomfort that virtual reality can cause with movement to force the player to almost feel a discomfort with their own body," he said. The scene isn't noticeably jerky, it's just ... different. And the choice is deliberate. "It doesn't make you sick, but I want people to have a slight physical side effect when they play through it, without making it extremely uncomfortable, of course, to create the notion that you're almost not part of your own body," he added.

I've felt sick during VR sessions before -- especially in the early days of bootstrapped development kits -- and this wasn't that. At no point did I feel compelled to take off the headset, nor did I actually worry about vomiting. Whether it was playing at a different framerate or something to do with movement speed, it led to a gentle feeling of disquiet that made for a more poignant experience.

Agianniotakis is clearly working hard to build The Circle as a carefully considered, almost educational experience. But he has no first-hand knowledge of being either transgender or a wheelchair user. Instead, he, writer Jess O'Kane and producer Ser En Low have relied on extensive research, both passively through reading studies and other material, and actively by getting feedback from trans people and people living with disability.

"The trans people I've been able to speak to are not gamers, and have difficulty giving feedback about it as a game," Agianniotakis explained, "but they were able to speak to the representation as a whole and explain some of the feelings that come with gender dysphoria."

Through one of the game's public showings, he met a small group of trans people from Manchester, England, who are ardent gamers. He hopes to convene with them again to further develop and hone the experience. The response from wheelchair users has also been positive, Agianniotakis said, but one of the strongest reactions actually came from the adolescent sibling of a wheelchair user, who found it enlightening to experience life, however briefly, from something closer to his brother's perspective.