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Released last year, Mosa Lina is a chaotic 2D platform puzzler full of bombs and frogs and spikeballs and tentacles, all subject to real-time physics. It’s an “aggressively random” response to what the developers call the “lock-and-key” philosophy of certain immersive sims. It’s also just been Major Updated, with new two player cooperative local and online multiplayer, various quality-of-life tweaks, new recording functionality, and a suite of gameplay changes or fixes to make Larian’s eyes water. If you’ve been holding out for a sim in which “frogs can jump off of other frogs” and “delete that’s deleted by delete triggers the delete’s deletion as it gets deleted”, well, I encourage you to get involved.
Here’s the full changelog. I will do my best to summarise it, using the bits of my brain that haven’t been fritzed by that sentence about deleting. As regards the multiplayer, it’s available across all existing modes and supports custom levels. There are also two new co-op exclusive modifiers that stack on top of existing ones.
As for the technical or quality of life stuff, the developers explain that “the web browser that was previously running the game is now gone” and that “underlying systems have been rebuilt to run fully natively”. One consequence is that “the entire game’s size is now less than 90mb (you only need like 60 floppy disks to store it)”. Excellent work, developers: I approve of anything that can be measured in floppy discs, even hypothetically.
They’ve introduced some keyboard remapping options and the game now runs at a fixed 120 ticks per second, meaning that it is “now consistent and behaves the same way for everyone, regardless of the PC configuration and performance”.
They’ve also replaced the old video recording system, which “severely impacted performance” and often caused the game to crash when left running for a while. The new version of the game uses Steam Recording instead, and lets you capture gifs to boot.
And then there’s the list of gameplay changes. I worry if I post the full thing it’ll cause your eyes to yeet themselves onto your keyboard and make a break for the nearest airvent, so here are my highlights:
– fruits don’t get heavier if you jump when you collect them
– non-super kinds of impossible places are still allowed
– moon will now try its best to spawn in more interesting places
– tentacle no longer gets holes
– butterfly no longer makes the ticking sound once it is destroyed
– super secret frog mode
– gungun no longer gets stuck in midair if picked up mid-backflip
– clamp no longer randomly decides to clamp multiple objects
– you can delete delete with delete
…Yes. The unspecified changelog author notes that while the game’s level editor hasn’t received any significant changes, the multitude of adjustments to tools and objects might make it feel that way. They caution that “some levels that were relying on specific object interactions (around 2% i think) have been broken at least partially” and that “there are a bunch of bandaids applied to make less things break, but some stuff just can’t be fixed by me”.
We didn’t review Mosa Lina. I think we probably should have. It’s like a bunch of very dehydrated Transformice developers set out to make a Deus Ex game. Perhaps we’ll circle back and do a write-up at Xmas.