How do you even begin to quantify the infinite?

How do you defeat the unbeatable?

How do you reach the end of the impossible?

Mosa Lina’s premise seems like one you would make in some kind of parody: a experience that seeks to be basically infinite, where RNG has such a presence that sometimes it can be completely unbeatable, failure is basically guaranteed at some point and your arsenal is also completely limited by luck itself. It describes itself as an ‘’hostile’’ interpretation of the immersive sim, but that would be an understatement; there’s no real level design, there are some set structures the game may apply to levels, but other than that absolutely nothing is planned. You have nothing but yourself.

It should be barely more than a joke, a proof of concept put out to be played and maybe laughed with by other people, a experiment without much substance that while absolutely commendable, wouldn’t be memorable in the long run.

And yet, here we are.

If you where to ask me ‘’What is Mosa Lina similar to?’’, it’d literally impossible to start comparing beyond the most superficial level; it visually reminds me of Gonner with all the head-weapon thing, and… yeah, that’d be pretty much it. This is no simple ‘’oh, the game is very original and doesn’t lift many ideas from others’’ or ‘’takes a bunch of concepts and makes something new!’’ type of thing, it’s that I’ve never seen or played something that comes close to being what Mosa Lina is, to do what it dares to do. The ‘’Rogue-Like/Lite’’ space gets a ton of criticism with how stagnate it has gotten and how it’s been oversaturated with titles reach the level of greatness the best titles in the genre do, and if that wasn’t enough, now this game arrives, and it puts the supposed premise of ‘’infinity’’ that some of those best works in question proclaim to have into questioning. I don’t even think that calling it an immersive sim’’, as the game presents itself, would be entirely correct; you don’t really get to interact with the levels beyond what your three available weapons let you, and even if that’s not exactly a small level of interaction, it’s yet another showcase of how impossible to catalogue this game into a proper category really is.

But all of this shouldn’t really mean anything, even if it had the best of ideas, that wouldn’t mean a lot if the execution was jarring; like I said at the beginning, it would be a respectable effort for sure, but not much more… but we are not living in such a scenario.

Nine levels.

Nine weapons for each selection.

And the magic… you make it happen.

After a pretty basic tutorial, you are thrown into Mosa Lina, and its up to you to really find how it works. Each of the ‘’weapons’’ acts completely from one another, but none feel useless; some might* be completely ineffective in certain scenarios, but they do not feel like a burden. Be it shooting boxes, squares, manipulating gravity or giving life to frogs with no neurons, these solutions are given to you, but not necessarily because they are the solution to a problem, because there’s never a real solution.

You fail. You retry. You fail. You win. You fail. You retry. You fail. You retry. You fail. You reroll and try your luck again. Each of these decisions, and what happens inside each level, it’s entirely your own, the game only goes as far to give you genius unpredictable scenarios, and the rest it’s up to you. There are times where it’ll be easy. Others you’ll be pondering and retrying for a while before finally nailing it down. Others aren’t possible with your current tools. And other times you may just get lucky. In all these possibilities, in all of these outcomes, it all feels earned, interesting and gratifying, even when al level is, by all accounts, unfair. And you keep pushing, and I kept pushing, because it made me feel pure wonder and awe, I wanted to keep experimenting, trying crazy stuff and managing to do it; it’s the ‘’Possibility Space’’ brought to its most insane result, a game that lets you to defy the impossible.

With each reset and each set of levels beaten, you keep moving forward in the null space, and you keep going, and going, and I kept going, and going, to see what lied at the end of the path, to see what I normally could never see. But at the end of the line there’s nothing, no ending, no reward, not even the credits: there’s nothing, and even if I should have felt a bit mad or disappointed, it couldn’t further from the truth, and I couldn’t think of anything more fitting. This is not a experience about a result, it’s about all of them, all of the little adventures, the steps at learning and sharing, at just feeling at peace if something doesn’t work or it can work. It doesn’t matter, there’s always another time to have another chance, and that’s fine. And I did it. And I kept coming back. And even with it’s fairly simple surface, I still find new ways to be surprised or feel that feeling of fun and creativeness sparking in my mind. And I utterly love it.

Even if it doesn’t click with you, even if you end up disliking it, I implore you to give it a try; it’s has the bravery to be unbeatable yet manages to be fun and infinitely replayable, it’s everything and it’s nothing both at the same time.

It’s the infinity.

And I adore it.