wfmag.cc \ 59ReviewRated
ReviewWhat a way to make a living
ork is rubbish, innit? Especially
nowadays, where doing it for
60 hours per week isn’t even
a guarantee that you’ll earn
enough dosh to pay for opulent
luxuries like basic sustenance and somewhere
dry to sleep or scroll through Twitter. You have
to wonder why anyone bothers. Apart from
the ever-looming threat of starving or freezing
to death, obviously. Mosaic is a short narrative
experience about, well, all of the above. You play a
dishevelled Office Man who does an indescribable
job for a gigantic faceless megacorp, and would
much rather be doing something else. The job
ostensibly allows him to be a
productive, fed, and sheltered
member of society, but in truth,
he barely earns enough money
to stay afloat, doesn’t get
enough sleep to concentrate,
and is on the verge of being sacked and suffering
a mental breakdown.
What starts as a Groundhog Day loop of a barely
tolerable morning routine develops into a series of
hallucinatory escapades which keep interrupting
the daily grind, and hinting at something more,
some deep, soul-felt yearning to be... in a jazz
band, or something?
Mosaic is comically ham-fisted in its portrayal
of working life, yet borderline abstruse in its
messaging – beyond the core idea that having
to go to work, y’know, sucks. It’s difficult to get a
read on what the game actually wants us to take
away from its admittedly beautiful and arresting
imagery. Its oppressive, dehumanising cityscapes.Its well-executed but sophomoric sequence of
surrealist metaphor, where the protagonist turns
into a piece of human chewing gum and gets
repeatedly stepped on, to pick one example.
Office Man gets up, cleans his teeth, ignores
the final notices, mucks about with his phone on
the tube, sees homeless people huddled on the
streets and thinks “that’s awful” while ignoring
them, and dreams about a talking goldfish. He’s
sad, and going mad. It’s the millennial experience
deconstructed and, for unclear reasons,
presented back at people living it.
Mosaic feels more like an art installation than an
adventure game. It’s a collection of scenes, which
are very well constructed and
give the viewer a lot of imagery
to mull over. But, it feels a little
toothless, as it holds up many
mirrors to reality without any of
them being windows to greater
understanding. It doesn’t skewer the office grind
in the way that, say, Death Stranding does the gig
economy. It just sort of goes, “This is all crap, eh?”
Thanks for pointing that out, video game narrative.
There is a lot to like here – the art direction is
sublime, with memorable setpieces that dare to
play with the camera, colour, and perspective in
ways that are genuinely quite rare and brilliant.
Every scene carries the perfect essence of some
universal facet of modern life – from the way your
alarm rips out of your cotton-wool dreams every
morning, to the way it just feels like everyone else
is handling all of this better than you.
Mosaic contains no revelation, no great insight.
But it will assure you that you are not alone.Mosaic
W
VERDICT
The messages are
muddled, and the point
is hard to find, but it’s
a beautiful experience
full of moments you’ll
recognise, and perhaps
see with fresh eyes.63 %
GENRE
Adventure
FORMAT
PC (tested) / Mac /
Linux / iOS (Apple
Arcade)
DEVELOPER
Krillbite Studio
PUBLISHER
Raw Fury
PRICE
£15.49
RELEASE
Out nowInfo
ReviewRated
REVIEWED BY
Dave HurstHIGHLIGHT
Your in-game smartphone
is where you’ll find
BlipBlop, a devilishly
simple game within a
game in which you tap a
button to get points. You
spend those points on
upgrades which generate
more points. It’s madly
addictive, and perfectly
satirises the simple but
devastating gameplay
loops of exploitative F2P
mobile games.“More like an art
installation than an
adventure game” This is BlipBlop. Mosaic is worth
getting just for BlipBlop.
BlipBlop on its own would get
90%. BlipBlop. (Now available on
its own.)
No, funnily enough, I never
envisioned becoming a human
meat cube and then discussing
the career implications of it with
a sentient goldfish while riding to
work on a ham-fisted metaphor.
When is this out on Switch?