If Inside grew up and got stuck in a dead end 8-to-5, it'd look like Mosaic. From Krillbite Studio, makers of Among the Sleep, comes this think-inside-the-box adventure game running on low-poly-style art and a washed-out palette. You play an intentionally anonymous-looking corporate wage slave—suit coat missing, button-down untucked—with the defeatist pose and small, dead eyes. You move through a dreary, side-scrolling world, a cog in a machine you can't possibly comprehend the size of.
While capitalizing on the mundane, it definitely looks like Mosaic goes some surreal places. We see our guy awake and already dressed for the drudgery before his phone alarm even goes off. We see him in an elevator with everyone using their phones so they don't have to talk to one another. We see him on a subway filled with people holding onto support with one hand and, yes, their phones in the other. Then it cuts to our guy in a back alley with the rainwater runoff and the cardboard-box-living people that are off the grid. Then giant business shoes come clomping after him, like a Monty Python skit taking place in a dystopian episode of The Office. The video finishes on a shot of him climbing a lonely corporate ladder wrought with cable wires and a blinding LED-lit corporate logo at the top.
Mosaic is on Apple Arcade now, and launches December 5 on Steam.
