Mosa Lina is a "hostile interpretation of the immersive sim" with a large dose of chaos

rockpapershotgun.com:

Good immersive sims are hard to beat. Almost nothing matches the feeling of creatively using all of your abilities to find a scrappy and sometimes unintentionally hilarious solution. Enter Mosa Lina, a pixel platformer that calls itself a “hostile interpretation of the immersive sim, where nothing is planned, and everything works.” Unpredictability is what the game prides itself on and “hostile” is definitely not an understatement based on the embedded developer tweet below.

ANNOUNCING OUR NEW GAME! Mosa Lina - a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim, where nothing is planned and everything workscoming to Steam in Autumn 2024 pic.twitter.com/xRSh1rNfgk

In Mosa Lina, you control a small pixel person who needs to reach the yellow ball on one side of a level, and presumably, get it back to the entrance in one piece. Death seemingly resets your abilities and randomly gives you a new set of three, forcing you to continuously experiment with every new run. How can you mix a stretchy ladder, some arrows, and an anti-gravity bomb? Who knows? Trying to make your hand of skills work seems like fun, though.

The Steam page says the game is a “response to the current trend of Immersive Sim design, where every ability is perfectly suited to solve a specific problem in the game.” As a counter to that “Lock and Key” design, Mosa Lina offers a “reckless abandon of predictability.” There’s no guarantee that your given abilities will even be able to solve certain puzzles, but that not-knowing is also freeing in a sense. Even the levels themselves are randomly selected, meaning you’ll only see a fraction of them in every playthrough, further adding some chaos to your runs.

Despite how punishing the game seems to be, I couldn’t