My eyes open and I lie motionless, hoping the working day won’t notice me if I stay still. The pale morning light puncturing my bedroom window is casting a long shadow from my shutters. Bedroom, yeah that’s a fucking joke if ever I heard one; you mean a bed shoved into the corner of my one-room shoebox they call a flat. For a moment I forget about my vapid existence and get lost watching tiny particles of dust dance in the feeble morning sun. Seconds later I’m forced to withstand the blinding light from my phone.. a text from my mum; she would tell me off for looking at my mobile in the dark. With the alarm off I notice my latest app, Blipblop and automatically start tapping. I tap and the number goes up, I tap faster to reach my next reward.. why and I playing this inane game? Wait I just levelled up, yes! My euphoria is suddenly garrotted by a text from my employer; apparently, my contract is up for review and I’m down 14% of my efficiency. I fix my tie, grab my umbrella and throw myself once more into the breach.

You’re not a beautiful and unique Snowflake

Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind is one of my favourite films of all time and it passed through my thoughts more than once when playing Mosaic. At the start of the film, Joel makes an audacious bid for freedom and jumps on the train heading the opposite direction to work. Trying to escape a path laid out before us is one of the central themes in Mosaic, a new game from Norway based developer Krillbite.

The game opens with a dream-like sequence that sees your character suspended in a deep body of water. As you inch towards wakefulness your body drifts into a box and as you open your eyes it forms into your domicile. The room that you call your home lacks any bright colours or comforts, it is a cold and featureless apartment that mirrors your very existence. Your fridge lacks anything that would qualify as real food, your bills have become insurmountable and it is clear your life has become a joyless struggle.

With a scruffy white shirt clinging to his underfed frame and scrawny neck: our character really reminded me of Tyler Durden (the Edward Norton one). Even the way you wearily shuffle along from place to place gives a feeling of ennui and that you’ve already been beaten by the machine that you inhabit. The sense of being stuck in the same monotonous routine is a feeling that many of us will be able to relate to. Like with so many film characters such as Truman Burbank or Mr Anderson from the Matrix, the need to escape the system reaches fever pitch and you are compelled to act. 

Cog in the Machine

Mechanically Mosaic doesn’t offer much in the way of gameplay and this will be our first fork in the road for many. Each day you will wake up wearing the same clothes and have the same basic choices in regard to brushing your hair and fixing your tie (or not). The one big decision for the player is whether to bring the goldfish you meet in your sink along for the ride. It is implied the fish is actually a construct of your imagination but with so many powerful hallucinations happening, it is hard to decide what is real and what is a figment of your desire to escape. 

Each day you head out of the door and apart from a few key areas, you will experience a different section of the commute to work. On your first day you emerge from your apartment and will notice warm light emanating from the end of the corridor. As you gaze out of the window and watch the rising sun you see a rainbow coloured circle above your head and you will come to know this as a sign that a vision is incoming. As you press to interact the window breaks and you are suddenly suspended in the sky, calmly gazing at the dazzling dawn in all its glory. This moment is made all the more impactful by how colourless and drab the reality you just left is.

As you complete more days you will notice a similitude of systems across the game and how people are regarded as little more than a resource in this world. While there are moments of euphoric clarity you can also happen across places of the game that give a very different feeling. If you wander off the predefined pathway you can find areas of your environment which give the impression you are not in fact in a reality but in some kind of digital simulation. As the system struggles to compensate for you being in an area off the beaten path, you will see the system reset and suddenly everything is back to monotone. As you progress further these hallucinations become more wild and visually disturbing, all the time enforcing the idea you are just a resource to feed the machine. 

The nearest thing to gameplay in Mosaic is the mini-game you must complete every day while at work. Your job is simply to extract resources and build a network of nodes so they can be filtered into the entity at the top, which happens to be your authoritarian employer. The people all around you are faceless drones who seem to find something about your presence repulsive because they will edge away when you stand near them. In complete contrast you will come across individuals playing various instruments and they stand out with vivid colours. These encounters will usually lead to another bout of surrealism which leaves you wondering where reality and imagination meet. 

The Problem is Choice

The issue I have with Mosaic is one of choice and consequences (or the lack thereof). Each day has a set path and along this route, you will come across these colourful beings that lead to vivid hallucinations. I won’t go into specific details for the sake of spoilers, but there are not many decisions you have to make in this game. If I had my druthers, there would be varied outcomes when you played these choices differently, but apart from a few minor changes, the conclusion of the game is the same.

I think when you make a game that is lacking conventional gameplay loops, some players will still need to feel a sense that they have made an impact on the world. If you play Mosaic once and never pick it up again, this will be a minor issue. I ran through the game three times testing the various interactions and it was disappointing to see a lack of consequence. Some of these interactions literally never change and I feel like these dead ends could have been micro-stories in themselves. I do like that as the days pass there will be various visual cues showing you are slowly becoming disillusioned with your life, like plants in your apartment slowly dying and the bin overflowing. However even here, why not give the player the option to water the plants and keep them alive?

Gaming Jim but not as we know it

As gaming evolves we have started to see titles that don’t just rely on conventional interactions. While killing an enemy is still the number one way to engage a player, there are an increasing amount of games that boil down to an interactive yomp. ABZU, Firewatch, Journey and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture are all good example of these ‘walking simulators’. I love each and every one of these aforementioned games because they each made me care about the journey regardless of gameplay mechanics. While some would baulk at the idea of playing games of this type, for the right player they can be exquisite experiences that trigger deep emotions and tell beautiful stories. 

It is invariably indie studios that give us these experiences because AAA studios are so preoccupied with making games that will appeal to the greatest number of people. It is this reason (among others) that I celebrate indie developers as much as I do, because apart from a few exceptions’ they are the real trailblazers of gaming evolution.

Is it PC?

As I have mentioned already, I absolutely love the visual style of Mosaic. People look like low polygon characters from a Tim Burton film with spider-like legs and almost ghoulish exteriors.   Some of the set pieces are brimming with visual flair and confidence. As you move around the world the camera is mostly out of your control and while this limits your view it also makes sure you’re seeing things as the developer wanted you to. There are very little options in the graphics tab but resolution and a detail preset are all this game really needs. In terms of performance, it ran fine from start to finish. On my second playthrough, I did experience two crashes and unfortunately, this seemed to make my game forget various actions I had taken or apps I had downloaded. I hope this is something that is addressed for the launch build.

You can use either mouse and keyboard or a controller to play Mosaic and I would flit between the two for various parts of the game. There is no speech as such and little more than the occasional squeal from NPCs as they intimate what they are feeling. Mosaic has a mixture of well-placed music, such as an opera piece when watching a butterfly dance or jazz from the colourful NPCs. When you encounter the sinister elements of the game there is more of a background hum, like an energy pulse getting louder. 

Conclusion 

Mosaic is a relatively short game that you can probably run through in a long afternoon or a few evenings. I did feel like the final conclusion to was a little too safe in its execution and I would have liked an ending that represented my decisions better. There is some fantastic build-up as you encounter some of the more disturbing scenes and I think these could have been expanded on to great effect. Other choices in the game also feel like they should have had a larger bearing on how the player’s path unfolded, as opposed to a few different lines of dialogue. 

However, these are minor issues when I consider the overall experience Mosaic presents to the player and how it stayed with me well after the credits rolled. With a very short gameplay return and no real replay factor, I can still recommend Mosaic, with the caveat that you enjoy these more stylistic titles. 

Thank you for reading my review of Mosaic on PC. I’d like to thanks Raw Fury for sending me an early review copy of the game as this really helps the site. Please follow me on Twiter @riggedforepic and bookmark us for more PC gaming content.