Mosa Lina is an immersive sim for people who hate the perfectionism of immersive sims
Immersive sims like Dishonored or System Shock can be very fulfilling, but they are also oddly stressful. After all, the flipside of the genre mantra of solving problems through imaginative application of the tools is that when you achieve a boring solution, that's all your fault. Did you miss the final jump while trying for a complex, third-storey infiltration in Deathloop, resulting in a sadly non-immersive firefight in the courtyard below? Did you fail to combo those magical abilities and terrain variables as the developers hoped - nay, dreamed you would, forcing you to rely on ye olde cover-shoot tactics to reach the checkpoint? Shame on you! Don't you know how much imsims cost to develop? Go back to Open-Ended Systems School and retake that course in The Power of Choice. Also, consider playing Mosa Lina instead.
It's out now on Steam, and is an immersive sim in which the tools available and the order of levels are randomised. This obliges experimentation, but it's also relaxing: you have no control over the options and obstacles, so no biggie if you don't do anything that colourful or majestic with them. The developer himself, Stuffed Wombat, admits that he's not able to check if every last level is beatable with any combination of tools. "It's this reckless abandon of predictability that allows you to stop worrying about 'winning' and frees you to enjoy the experimentation," he writes on the Steam page. "Fun things happen more often if you don't force them." Oh thank god.
Aside from being comfort food for recovering Arkane junkies, Mosa Lina might also appeal if you've played a lot of old physics-heavy Flash games and especially, the crackpot multiplayer sandboxer Transformice. It's a 2D platform affair in
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