It may not look it on the surface but videogames are almost always fair, and even kind to the player. You’ve got a problem but the tools at your disposal are specifically designed around solving it. Sure, a good puzzle may not seem like all the bits fit together but then eventually they do, whether that be something obvious like “stun the boss by dropping a thing on it before attacking” or less obvious like the infamously classiccat-hair moustache. All the tools are there specifically designed for the purpose of success, and wouldn’t it be nice if life worked like that. Sometimes you’ve got a screw and a screwdriver, sometimes you need to persuade a standard screwdriver to work a phillips-headed screw or even bash a nail with a rock. It’s great to have the right tool for the job but that’s not always possible, and Mosa Lina is a game about figuring out how to make due with what you’ve got.
The basic setup of Mosa Lina is you’re a character with three tools and need use them to retrieve a gold coin then return to the entrance portal in a small 2D platformer area. If the coin is high up and you’ve got a bunch of boxes, stacking them under your feet should cover it nicely. If you’ve got a ladder that reaches halfway and a bomb, though, then it becomes a platforming challenge as you jump at the right time at the top of the ladder for the bomb detonation to boost you into the coin. The levels are generally fairly simple but the physics of everything interacting can be complicated, and the trick is to figure out how to use what the random draw of three tools from the total collection gave you to work with. There’s no real guarantee that all levels are solvable with all tool combinations, but if there’s anything watching speed-runs should have taught us it’s that anything will work eventually if people bang their heads against it hard enough.
Mosa Lina was announced for a fall 2023 release window, but there’s a web prototype of a very early versionavailable on itch.ioif you want to get a feel for the basic concept. The full version is expanded dramatically in every way, with a huge number of levels drawn from at random to create each run, not to mention far more tools and better control over their usage. This is normally the point where I’d have a trailer showing the game running with all the bells and whistles, but seeing as it hasn’t been posted that won’t quite work here. Insteadhead over to Steamto give the trailer a look, and get ready to give the tool-using monkey aspect of your brain a workout because while the optimal tool for the job may not be available, the right one is whatever works.
