Countering "lock and key" design with hostile immersive sim Mosa Lina

gamedeveloper.com:

"I think immersive sims started to believe their own marketing material. That never fosters creativity," says Mosa Lina developer Josh Hollendonner, explaining why he felt compelled to create what he describes as a "hostile interpretation" of the genre.

Hollendonner, who also goes by the moniker 'Stuffed Wombat' in development circles, launched Mosa Lina in October in response to the current trend of predictable "lock and key" immersive sim design.

Here, there are no premeditated solutions for players to find. Instead, they'll need to experiment with abandon by combining objects in nonsensical ways to overcome a series of physics-driven platforming puzzles across randomly generated levels. Though, as Hollendonner points out later, each stage was built using a randomly selected combination of hand-crafted content rather than procedural generation.

During an email Q&A with Game Developer, Hollendonner explained he wanted Mosa Lina to "push back" against design sensibilities that often lead players down a preset path. "[In a lot of immersive sims] I see a door and I just know, deep in my gut, that I can open it somehow. I just need to find the correct item or purchase the correct upgrade and I just get tired. It’s all mapped out for me, like a choose your own adventure book," he says.

"Instead of asking you to choose between two doors that lead to the same room, I wanted to make a game that forces you to get truly creative. So it's an 'aggressive interpretation' because it takes a direction I don't like and attacks it, trying to show that there is so much more cool stuff we could be doing."

Crucially, Hollendonner says he wanted Mosa Lina to feel "completely intrinsic." That's why he chose to shun extrinsic motivators such as