Mosaic Review
Dark and dreary has never been so good.
From childhood terror to the grinding monotony of adult life, Krillbite Studios have developed another haunting experience, picking out the motions of everyday life and exposing them for what they are.
Mosaic should be compulsory education for CEOs and politicians. A powerful political tool, it sculpts with extreme delicacy and dignity what becomes of us when everything is damp and grey. If you’ve ever been pushed into a box that wasn’t quite you, or surrounded by people who you don’t quite understand – an outlier when everything else seems so neat – then Mosaic will help you get dirty and visceral with what that really means.
As a quiet and slow protagonist, you spend so much of your life walking, fretting, and checking your phone. The grinding effort of every activity, dragging yourself physically out of bed or brushing your teeth with a dull stare… you just ache for something to happen. Krillbite keep boredom expertly at bay, with gorgeous animations and an array of tiny details that dangle hope in front of you just enough to keep you fighting.
Some painfully poignant pieces of writing make so much sense, giving you something to relate to even if you’ve never actively engaged with what you’re doing. Checking the mail but leaving it unopened when you sense bills you can’t pay, receiving aggressive notifications from work about your productivity, and following music and colour wherever you can. A break from the monotone and the greyscale, you will often be given the choice to wander until you find a small piece of your spark in the most unexpected of places.
You might pet a cat, or dream of flying out a window, or stop to enjoy the music of a street performer – small treasure, but crucial. Embodying a butterfly in a dream-like state may break up the day, swooping and swirling, only to be ground up by machinery at the height of your freedom. But I really don’t do it justice. Rare in a game of this type, there is no pretention to be found here. It is slow and mysterious and dark – but the dread and the cold surround you in a silent world far more than if the characters were monologuing every five minutes.
Mosaic is not quite a walking sim, as it involves some gorgeous perspective-twisting puzzles, and an array of mini-games. Your phone will be your constant companion, filling your time with mindless clicker games, or watching yourself be turned down by everyone you ‘like’ on a dating app. You can check messages from friends, hurt that you never respond. You can check your bank as it sinks into the minus figures.
This game is far from therapeutic in one sense, but it does provide a sense of haunting empathy that many feeling the emotions of the protagonist would be hard pushed to express. When you feel like this guy does, and many of you will, it would do just fine to send a copy of this game to anyone who has trouble understanding. If you fixate on small details, stick your head in the sand, or feel overwhelmed by a crushing sense of everything always being the same… Mosaic is a tool for conveying that which cannot be said.
The main drive with this game is to find some light in the darkness. Even disturbing dreams break up the status quo. You’ll be thankful for nightmare, thankful for dissent, you’ll be glad you didn’t always follow the rules.
Although it doesn’t always run smoothly, and you can sometimes get stuck trying to manoeuvre, the environments are rich in their simplicity. The city breathes, and feels so big and once full of promise, yet everything looks the same. News bulletins on your phone will give you some insight into this world, and I encourage you to look around as much as possible – even if it makes you late for work.
This isn’t the kind of game you want to come home from work to play. It’s hard to identify a niche, and I’ll be honest: it does make you feel pretty flat after a while. But it needs to be played. It’s something compelling and unique that flaunts its potential and keeps you yearning for more. A lot of the pain it makes you feel comes from insinuation and desire – and the team behind the direction may have done something powerful here for mental health expression.
Mosaic is a cold game in which you strive to find even a shred of warmth. It fills you with a desire to be better, to talk deeply to yourself and reassess your values. It doesn’t feel like a game, exactly, but more of an experience in empathy. Full of quirky dark humour that for once doesn’t come in the form of cringy dialogue, and enriched with concepts that could make even the most steeled among us weep, Mosaic does the heart some good.
[Reviewed on PC]