Mosa Lina is a "hostile interpretation of the immersive sim" with a large dose of chaos
Prepare to die, a lot
Good immersive sims are hard to beat. Almost nothing matches the feeling of creatively using all of your abilities to find a scrappy and sometimes unintentionally hilarious solution. Enter Mosa Lina, a pixel platformer that calls itself a “hostile interpretation of the immersive sim, where nothing is planned, and everything works.” Unpredictability is what the game prides itself on and “hostile” is definitely not an understatement based on the embedded developer tweet below.
In Mosa Lina, you control a small pixel person who needs to reach the yellow ball on one side of a level, and presumably, get it back to the entrance in one piece. Death seemingly resets your abilities and randomly gives you a new set of three, forcing you to continuously experiment with every new run. How can you mix a stretchy ladder, some arrows, and an anti-gravity bomb? Who knows? Trying to make your hand of skills work seems like fun, though.
The Steam page says the game is a “response to the current trend of Immersive Sim design, where every ability is perfectly suited to solve a specific problem in the game.” As a counter to that “Lock and Key” design, Mosa Lina offers a “reckless abandon of predictability.” There’s no guarantee that your given abilities will even be able to solve certain puzzles, but that not-knowing is also freeing in a sense. Even the levels themselves are randomly selected, meaning you’ll only see a fraction of them in every playthrough, further adding some chaos to your runs.
Despite how punishing the game seems to be, I couldn’t be more excited for some tomfoolery in what can only be described as my version of rocket science. (Seriously, my brain won't stretch past what this game requires.) Plus, Tears Of The Kingdom’s scrappy physics experiments were so fun earlier this year and I just want more of that on PC, please.
Mosa Lina is set to release later this year - ignore the 2024 date on the above Tweet; it’s apparently a typo, say developers Stuffed Wombat. For now, you can find out more on Steam.