Review: Mosaic

There are some games that speak to us on a certain level, one that you just don’t expect to blow you away with their meaning until you get past your prejudices and continue playing. Mosaic is one of those games. At first, I wouldn’t have kept trying after the first puzzle if I didn’t have to review the game. I wasn’t enjoying myself and I wasn’t liking the puzzle section.

I actually had to run to YouTube to see what I was doing wrong to continue my time with the game.  The game does not hold your hand or really tell you what to do to meet your next “Milestone.”

I didn’t know what to expect when I started to review this game. It opened with a beautiful scene of a man waking, walking through his apartment and then having an epiphany at a window in his hallway. Once his epiphany has ended you go back to the dreary gorgeous world that Krillbite created. You slowly trudge to your job and that’s when the first puzzle happens.

Keep in mind I had NO IDEA what to do, the controls were funky, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to use touch screen or handheld controls. After twenty minutes or so I decided on handheld, the touch screen was too difficult for my giant hands.

This puzzle section was so confusing and the tiny little blips that would come on screen really didn’t help. Some of the instructions would be for the handheld controls and then some for the touch screen controls. It took me about twenty minutes to figure out which one to do and once I did I somewhat enjoyed the puzzle sections. In the first one you have to build a mosaic, oddly enough.

You use extractors to take over more and more the screen. The more extractors the more little circles that fly around to unlock more and more parts of the mosaic. Once you get high enough in the mosaic you can hit your “Milestone” and continue with the game.

As you progress the puzzle levels get more and more difficult, but nothing that can’t be overcome. You get upgrades so that you can produce more little circles to unlock more extractors which gets you to the “Milestone” faster. However, the game begins to throw little challenges in your way.

If you look at the mosaic you’re creating as cells the game throws disease in your path that you must lock down before it infects your mosaic. You can look at this disease as a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you interpret the game. I’ll tell you how I interpreted the game in my last paragraph; and it will have some spoilers.

I enjoyed the desolate world more than I did the puzzle sections, dragging a mouse icon and figuring out how to get to the “Milestone” just wasn’t that much fun to me. What I did like was the time with the main character before we got to work. Kind of like real life, I enjoy my time before work but somewhat dread heading into work; as most people do. This world however is overrun with buildings and pollution; imagine New York City without Central Park. Pretty dreary right?

Then, I hit a snag, a snag that the developer knows about and is working on a fix for. At the time of publication the game stopping glitch has not been fixed. After the second puzzle section you wake in your apartment and begin to go about your daily routine.

That’s when the snag hits, if you go to any of the prompts in your bathroom your character just stops and stares off out the window. At first I thought this was part of the game but I couldn’t regain control of my character. I shut down, tried again and he would just stare off looking for purpose. I restarted the game, and got the same snag, I even uninstalled the game and reinstalled it and the snag would still occur.

The good thing is that Krillbite knows about the issue and is fixing it. The bad thing is that I wanted to see how this story played out.

I was enjoying the hell out of this game, especially since I had grasp the puzzle sections. I wanted to see what was up with my main character, I wanted to see if what was foreshadowed came to pass. I will wait for the update to come, I just hope it comes soon. The way to play this right now is NOT on the Switch, even though there are touch screen controls and the puzzles are long enough to take on the road. If you want to play this PC would probably be the best option right now. I’m bummed this glitch exists because the game really is awesome and I want to see it to it’s conclusion.

This review is based on a review code provided by the publisher