Mosaic

Although I wasn’t overly entranced by Mosaic — its approach is too straightforward for my taste — I tip my hat to the developers for making a game that punctures a hole in the noxious ideology that work, necessarily, gives meaning to our lives.

Mosaic is a not so far dystopian future.

Mosaic is the plight of the office worker reimagined for the not-to-distant dystopian future. The tedium, the soullessness, the loneliness — it's all here, presented with sleek, stylish art and simple, effective mechanics. But, the burden of virtual corporate slavery is perhaps too much to bear; the game is prone to frequent bouts of monotony that pull players out of the experience.

Mosaic is a game that tries to ease the player into a melancholy atmosphere, only broken up by small glimpses of light. There are no typical challenging gameplay systems or problems to solve, but that is kind of the point of the game.

There are some brilliant glimpses in Mosaic, moments that really can bring you to some deep thoughts on your life, but these few moments are diluted in a quite tedious experience, overall.

A game about breaking free from monotony that gets, perhaps inevitably, a little monotonous.

Mosaic tries to send some positive signals towards one of the most important issues that modern human is facing right now, and it deserves credit for that; but in the meantime, the developers forgot that it is a video game and should be fun and entertaining, rather than being boring and dull.

Mosaic could have been a very good short animation movie, with it's great artistic touch and a nice story. As a videogame it's pretty lame as we're still looking for a gameplay. Proceed with caution, even if you love walking sims.

Criticism without nuance of the consumer society and the deadly routine of the employee, Mosaic develops a style, a subject but remains an extremely harsh experience. Difficult to recommend it as a video game, its final form seems more suited to that of a short film, the interaction is already extremely limited.

It's not especially original, and at this point seeing any piece of media where someone quits their job, magically overcomes all their debt, and runs off to write poetry in the woods is something worthy of eye rolls and tongue clicks. It doesn't help that the game controls like a hapless man in his late twenties who can barely muster the energy to move his spinely legs.

Whether it’s the indulgence of its presentation or simply the lack of reason from its players to really care about such a dire portrayal of modern-day life (implying harsher truths or not), Mosaic seldom lands any sort of balance between involvement through gameplay and artistic direction for the journey to feel worth trudging through. For a game all about trying to break out of a cycle and changing one’s perspective, Mosaic seems oddly content in the same drab pretense that in the end, through needless repetition, still arrives at nowhere meaningful or memorable.