Wasn't really a fan of this one at first, but it grew on me on my second run. You get a random set of abilities and a random set of levels, then you're tasked with clearing each of the levels in a random order using a smaller (and still random) selection of your set of abilities that is chosen when the level loads. Did I mention the game is random? There's even a disclaimer that, depending on the rolls, you might just genuinely be unable to win and have to start a new run.

The abilities lead to some interesting gameplay, but ultimately I think I was frustrated more often than anything for a while. It's a very neat concept that I can appreciate, but actually playing it didn't always feel fun. I think I started to crack through in my second run, but I couldn't really be bothered to play more.

Took me a while to really click with this one. I don't really think Mosa Lina is actually a "hostile interpretation of the immersive sim", I think it would be much better defined as indifferent. Its core concept is as simple as it gets: using a few randomly selected "weapons", you must clear similarly random single-screen levels by touching or destroying a few apples then going back to a portal. The ninth of these levels gets expanded into a bigger challenge, and if you beat that, you get a weird "ending", and then it's back to the grind. There's no form of greater progression and no secrets to be found, all you get is the gameplay.

Mosa Lina's brilliance is also the cause of its greatest flaw. There's very little systems in place to ensure that your experience is fair or engaging: sometimes you will get levels that take no effort to beat, sometimes they're almost impossible, or downright unbeatable. The reason for that is that nothing is predetermined. Levels are created with no specific solutions in mind, and that means that whatever you do to win was indeed your strategy, whether it was just clicking a button once or setting up a Rube-Goldberg machine worthy of history's greatest minds. That shit do be an immersive sim, on a much deeper level than just about any other game in the genre, which usually just feeds you multiple pre-determined avenues for success. Mosa Lina takes a while to get into and even after that it's not always particularly fun but it does have extremely high highs (Just check this shit out), and more than that is just a really interesting experiment overall.