Mosaic brings maximum discomfort on PC next month
Late shift
As much as I might like winter, it's hell for commuting. The buses are crowded, the darkness has sapped the colour from the air. Each day feels like it begins after the journey out and ends before the trip back home. The perfect time, then, for Krillbite Studios to release Mosaic - their eerie corporate follow-up to 2015's Among The Sleep. After a four year ride to work, Mosaic is clocking into PC stores in one month's time.
Mosaic sure looks a far cry from Among The Sleep's first-person horror. But despite ditching infant antics for a painfully relatable daily grind, Krillbite are establishing themselves as quite adept at bringing maximum discomfort to mundane situations.
Mosaic is a corporate meat-grinder through the lens of Playdead's Limbo. It's an eerie, muted adventure game about the status quo, as your be-suited salaryman goes back and forth on his grim commute to his grim job, killing time through obsessively rubbish mobile games. When Malindy Hetfield took a shift in Mosaic's cubicle last year, she found a game that urged her to break from the crowd to find moments of beauty.
It also increasingly paints drudging white-collar labour as a monstrous machine quite literally devouring everything caught in its path. “It’s not a happy game," Krillbite CEO Jon Cato Lorentzen told us back then. “It’s just like real life. You need to find your happiness where you can.”
Of course, if you're one of those fancy folks with an Apple Arcade subscription, you might well already know all this. Mosaic dropped completely by surprise on Apple's subscription service. Us poor sods on PC must wait a few weeks longer.
Mosaic launches on Steam and GOG on December 5th for £15.49/€20/$20. Pre-ordering gets you into the 1% DLC, which hands you a nice tie, a pretty phone cover, and less frequent in-game fake ads on your in-game fake phone. Neat.