Released last year, Mosa Lina is a messy, 2D platformer full of bombs, frogs, spiked balls, and tentacles, all governed by real-time physics. It’s an “aggressively random” answer to what the creators call the “lock and key” philosophy of some immersive simulators. It just got a major update, introducing up-to-date two-player cooperative multiplayer, local and online, various quality-of-life improvements, up-to-date recording functionality, and a bunch of gameplay changes or fixes that will make Larian’s eyes water. If you’ve been waiting for a simulator where “frogs can jump off other frogs” and “deleting what’s been deleted by deletion triggers deletion deletion when it’s deleted,” well, I encourage you to get involved.
Here full list of changes. I’ll try to summarize this using the parts of my brain that weren’t destroyed by that sentence about deleting. As for multiplayer, it’s available in all existing modes and supports custom levels. There are also two up-to-date exclusive co-op mods that stack on top of existing ones.
On the technical or quality front, the developers explain that “the web browser that previously powered the game is gone” and that “the underlying systems have been rebuilt to run fully natively.” One consequence is that “the size of the entire game is now less than 90 MB (you only need about 60 floppy disks to save it).” Great job, developers: I’m all for anything that can be measured on floppy disks, even hypothetically.
Several keyboard remapping options have been introduced, and the game now runs at a fixed rate of 120 ticks per second, meaning it “is now consistent and behaves the same for everyone, regardless of their PC setup and performance.”
They also replaced the senior video recording system, which “severely impacted performance” and often caused the game to crash after being run for a while. The up-to-date version of the game uses Steam Recording instead and allows you to capture gif files.
And then there’s the list of gameplay changes. I’m afraid if I post the whole thing your eyes will dart to your keyboard and run to the nearest air vent, so here are my highlights:
– fruits don’t get heavier if you jump while picking them
– impossible places that aren’t super are still allowed
– the moon will now try to appear in more fascinating places
– the tentacle no longer has holes
– the butterfly no longer makes a ticking sound when destroyed
– super secret frog mode
– the gungun no longer gets stuck in the air if picked up during a backflip
– clamp will no longer randomly decide to clamp multiple objects
– you can delete delete with delete
…Yes. The unspecified author of the changelog notes that while the game’s level editor hasn’t received any significant changes, the abundance of tool and object customizations might make it seem that way. They warn that “some levels that relied on specific object interactions (about 2%, I think) have been at least partially broken” and that “there are a ton of patches that are supposed to make things less broken, but there are some things I just can’t fix.”
We haven’t reviewed Mosa Lin. I think we probably should. It’s like a bunch of very drained Transformice developers decided to make a Deus Ex game. Maybe we’ll come back and review it for Christmas.