Recent reviews by bomrad

This might be one of the most laziest written, predictable, most pretentious games I've ever played.
It's trying sooo hard to pretend that it's deep and thoughtful and yet this janky walkathon bioshock ripoff has absolutely nothing of interest to say.
The plot with all it's surface level aspirations of intelligent timey wimey complexity is incredibly shallow, incoherent and ends up without bothering to explain anything whatsoever.

While the visual aesthetic and sound design are fantastic, mechanically and thematically it falls short of being worth $30 in my opinion.

In an already crowded field of post-point&click narrative adventures that serve some critique of contemporary social alienation, Mosaic doesn't add anything new to the conversation.
Not only do it's setting and themes feel cliched and obvious if you played other games like this but, worse still, it seems to adopt these themes as no more than as an aesthetic choice.

spoilers ahead

The entire game the player character suffers from the monotony of daily routine, encouraged by his spirit animal to find a way out. Ironically for the player the only way is straight forward on a monotonous linear path. Even the moments wherein the protagonist escapes his greyscale existence with the help of a street performer (lol) are pretty easy run-of-the-mill puzzles. Even more ironic perhaps is that for me, the one reprieve was being able to play Blip Blop, an in-world idle/clicker mobile game, as I held right on the joystick towards whatever hollow, albeit beautiful, scene the game would direct me towards next.
Throughout the game the protagonist receives threatening text messages telling how many more times he can be late for work before his contract is terminated. Later he walks through an alleyway where some who have been less fortunate are forced to live in cardboard boxes but instead of connecting with them as fellow humans the way he does with the busking musicians, the homeless are objectified, abstracted to pairs of arms that reach towards him threatening to drag him under like shades of the underworld. They are othered. They are that to fear oneself becoming, and nothing more.
They are not like the noble street musicians, and they are never referred to again.

The player character's spirit animal (?) who has travelled in his pocket each day, and whom it is inferred was enabling the colourful respites with the street performers, later says after the run in with the homeless horde something to the effect of "If you still don't know what to do ..., I'll give you some time to figure it out."
But there is nothing to figure out. The last chapter of the game following this directs the player just as the rest of the game in a single obvious direction to an ending as visually appealing as it is shallow and unsatisfying.

Mosaic is a game with a lot of style and heart and almost nothing whatsoever to say.
I'd rather be Blipping Blops.

(also it's $30 for like ~2.5 hours of gameplay)