Moses, of Krillbite Studio, is not an it's fun a game. It will not keep you on the edge of your seat, and it will get your blood pumping. In fact, Moses is not a game at all in many ways; it belongs to the past of physical life in the digital age – but not one that follows its proper lines of questioning or deep philosophical meanings.
Originally released by phones as part of the Apple Arcade before it goes to PC and then converted (and other consoles), Mosael is played around with a portable display, with a left stick used to slide our anonymous protagonist from one place to another – often in 2D space. It's actually a "point-and-click" adventure, with limited contact on things like light switches and occasional combinations of characters – most of which are completely optional. In fact, you can ignore most of the game's interactions, but in doing so the already bleak world seems like such a little quiet.
In this satirical, almost stressful, experience, players pass through time spent the same journey, accomplishing the same mind-blowing task, and eagerly looking for some kind of explanation in the hours between end-to-end exchanges and the next episode.
This purposeful creation offers little in terms of actual gameplay, with players simply wandering from work to home, and back to the main part – and that's probably the point. Most of Moses turns his attention to pulling our protagonist from one place to another, completing a small grid-based game to pass the time at work, and most of the spells often surround his phone.
This phone offers a lot of escape from the real-world with color, with a dating app (with some users looking odd from each other, commenting on the raw community and chasing the same visual aids), my bitcoin recovery capabilities, and BlipBlop – a game of to-play mobile rotates a button to increase points.
It's as good as it sounds, but this "game within a game" (game-design, if you will) is the only episode of Moses' world that offers any positive reinforcement, and being the end of the game, the subtlety – Escape of the mark. It's the simplest form of entertainment imaginable, but in Moses' world, BlipBlop works like rain in drought – a small window of dopamine in a different world.
That world follows much of the indie title playbook Limbo (and the narrator Inside) set as a template, with short shades of color, usually in the form of dreams or hallucinations, spreading behind a background of shades of gray. It is dark, muddy, and possibly very familiar to those who have spent any time going to ungodly times.
Characters are low quality, are copied in size and stray with facial detail – everyone who goes with a co-worker and their other faces in the crowd, all just pass and count the days. There are exceptions, but for the most part, for only one length, for example, the corridor we all travel down. If you've been scared to get up in the morning and go to work, Mosaic will make you laugh.
Unfortunately, while its analysis is rich and detailed, Moses is struggling to find a way other than "look at how many lives", and "rely on technology for our happiness". No. The Dark Miracle, which is a shame – as there is a third descriptive act of Moses that he cannot indeed delete its working time of 3 hours.
In the meantime, though, Moses portrays the players as just another cog in the machine – but this machine doesn't take the whole thing as exciting, like treating us with a magnifying glass but neglecting to tell us where to look.
Conclusion
Looking at the barriers in today's price-free society, Mosaum is a shorter version that seems to be content with telling us what's wrong with our lives without going beyond that. There is an important message that is trapped within the game elsewhere, but it never really goes away, and the experience is more depressing than fun. That may be what the developer was up to, but in the end, it doesn't make the video game more interesting.
