There's beauty hidden just beyond the construction that clouds our discolored cities. People are making music, but we're too busy buried in our phones, set in a routine, to join their song. Mosaic paints a world of monochrome dystopia, where disobedience is necessary and the only way to fail is by complying.
From Killbrite Studios, the team behind Among the Sleep, Mosaic is a short but satisfying game (first released exclusively on Apple Arcade) that tackles a number of issues plaguing our modern world. An unnamed organization seems to run everything, from the highly-addictive game that is - at the start - the only app on the player's phone, to the skyscraper that houses a vast number of identical employees. Advertisements peppered throughout the gray and brutalist world indicate a need for people to feel connected. The app Love(TM) helps one's search for a soulmate; another prescribes a drug that guarantees happiness.
But one doesn't have to travel far to unravel the grasp at power just below the corporate smile. A robotic, repetitive need to control, to regulate, and to eventually eliminate creativity. A newspaper blurb describes the criminalization of street performance, a surefire way to make your daily commute more dull. It's easy to see the parallels between Mosaic's world and our own. Held up under the magnifying glass of an industrial, glowing mirror, we are meant to question what draws us back to our phone every day. And what is it all for?
Mosaic only takes a few hours to beat, if finishing the game truly feels like any accomplishment. You play as an office drone, marching to work in your futuristic city day after day, with failure just around the bend and success always out of reach. Notifications on your ever-present phone remind you of work tardiness and the threat of termination. The Love(TM) app registers no matches; after all, we are all alone.
The gameplay in Mosaic is more or less suggestions: pull yourself out of bed each morning, brush your teeth. The controls lead your mopey main character through his bleak existence, like a positive force in his life. It's as if your actions are the only thing keeping him from continuing on as normal, not stopping to appreciate the butterfly that colors his banal walk to work.
When you aren't helping a man break from routine, the player both witnesses and contributes to it. The app BlipBlop on the worker's phone allows you to press a button "Blip" and receive "Blops." With blops, you can purchase power-ups that allow you to more quickly accumulate more blops. It's a never-ending and rightfully addictive pattern; each click makes a satisfying sound, the growing number of blops feeding you just the burst of dopamine you need to forget about the world around you.
Your job is purposeless as well: hitting an unknown "milestone" by feeding points through a sort of trap-laden maze. The dots travel upwards from the place they are generated to a marker that must be satiated. Its mechanical desire echoes that of the player's strange detours to power boxes on his commute. The glow of the screen calls to him; why wouldn't the icy blue blinking of some metal, unwieldy force?
Mosaic's graphics are simple, low-poly with muted colors, the characters faceless, each an uncanny doppleganger of the last. The light, bluesy soundtrack (with beats of brilliance in moments) a perfect backdrop to the mundane. The game shines in its surrealist moments the brightest, from sequences where giant shoes stomp down along a barren path to the recycling (quite literally) of the human experience into something more digestible; read, you must escape a junkyard as a cubed-version of yourself.
Are games meant to be fun, or simply something to distract us from the injustice around us: homelessness, deforestation? Mosaic's gameplay is purposefully opaque, the meaning behind your actions blurred to a point where continuing on may seem pointless. It may not always be engaging, but those with patience will unravel an uplifting message about human connection. The irony is hopefully not lost on the player; that a game about freeing oneself from your phone... is played on one.
Mosaic is available on PC and the Apple Arcade with planned releases on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch for $19.99. Screen Rant was provided with a digital PC copy for the purpose of this review.