Clearly, the communication around the game has been perfectly mastered. One of the highlights of the marketing campaign was the release last June of BlipBlop on Android and iOS. This little incremental game is very simple: just click on a button to get a "blip" then spend a certain amount of blips in order to unlock options allowing... to get more blips. The circle is complete, and the player quickly finds himself trapped in an infinite concept, meaningless but terribly addictive. But what is the relationship with Mosaic? Well, the hero (or rather the anti-hero) of the adventure can also play BlipBlop. You can therefore draw your virtual smartphone at any time, and enjoy BlipBlop directly in Mosaic. When you get on the elevator and people look away from you, when you're standing at the subway bar, or when you're taking an escalator, this is the best way to pass the time.
Mosaic is indeed a game about boredom and routine. Every day, your character must get up, brush his teeth and go to his office, located in a gigantic and inhuman tower.
Mosaic is indeed a game about boredom and routine. Every day, your character must get up, brush his teeth and go to his office, located in a gigantic and inhuman tower. The best moment of the day is certainly to read the few daily news that are made available on our smartphone. These cynical little texts say a lot about the world of the game which, and it's almost frightening, is really not very far from ours. One of Mosaic's greatest successes lies in this atmosphere that is both dystopian and contemporary, which forces us to question the state of the current world. The other strong point of the adventure comes from the artistic direction, which recalls at times that of Inside and manages to be attractive despite the almost exclusive use of multiple shades of gray.
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
A few touches of color, however, brighten up the journey of our sad man. It could be the rising sun, a cat perched on a tree, a fluttering golden butterfly, or even a street musician. All these elements bring a bit of joy to our avatar, whose imagination then gets carried away for a few moments. For the player, it's an opportunity to enjoy some surreal sequences, sometimes cinematic, sometimes playable, but always pleasant. Special mention for the two passages playing on the changes of scale. Become tiny we find ourselves having to avoid the shoes of passers-by or, become giant, we evolve heavily among office buildings less impressive than before. The theme of work is also omnipresent, since the message of the game can be summed up as "rather than going to the office every day to carry out a meaningless task, wouldn't you be better off enjoying nature and to play music with your friends? Originality level, we have seen better…
While waiting for the deliverance that the player will inevitably bring him, our character drowns (almost literally) in work. His productive day is symbolized by a mini-game that must be solved each day. It's a kind of austere and physics-free World of Goo, where you have to build a tower using resource points spitting building elements. The principle could have been interesting, but the developers deliberately limited the scope and the fun of the experience. In order not to contradict the highly philosophical statement "work is boring", there was no question of making these sequences supposed to represent our day at work fun. Too bad, here is a missed opportunity to enrich the gameplay of the adventure, almost non-existent elsewhere.
THE NIGHT TROUBLE
The same principle applies to the different applications available in our smartphone, with the exception of BlipBlop. The one dedicated to the bank shows us our expenses and our salary, and we say to ourselves that we will have to manage all that. It will in fact be nothing at all. The one dedicated to virtual meetings is only a gimmick parodying Tinder and has no consequences. And the one dedicated to BlipCoin allows you to invest in a fictitious crypto-currency... but the value of the latter rises inexorably as soon as you sell and plummets as soon as you buy! We understand the idea but, once again, the message conveyed prevents the development of real gameplay. We are therefore content to move forward on the rails provided by the developers and to click here or there on completely useless interactions (look inside the half-empty fridge, arrange his tie, land on the sofa, etc.).
Nothing interesting ever happens, and no matter how systematically you check your mailbox each new day, it will systematically contain the same useless envelopes, which you can't even pick up. The developers never dare to leave their credo, which consists in simulating the boredom of the main character… even if the player also experiences this feeling. This risky bet leads to inevitable lengths, all the more difficult to accept as the game only lasts three hours. Thawed icing on the cake: the presence of some benign bugs but still regrettable. All linked to bad placement calculations, they gave us the opportunity to see our character contort in a totally unrealistic way to open the fridge, mimic the opening of the mailbox in a vacuum, or even… have a radius light coming out of his buttocks rather than his heart at the very end of the adventure! The poetic character of this emotional sequence then took a big hit in the wing. In the end, we therefore come out quite disappointed with Mosaic, whose substance unfortunately does not live up to the form.
