Mosa Lina

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local), 2 Co-Op (Online), Online Content Sharing

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Review:

Mosa Lina is a physics-based Puzzle-Platformer released on PC in 2023 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2025. This game puts players in the role of a character trying to get from a level’s portal to touch or knock offscreen fruit that are strewn around the level, then get back to the portal. To do so, they’ll need to make use of a gun that can shoot three randomly-selected tools that are re-rolled every time you start the level, such as boxes, bombs, teleportation portals… or an extra pair of legs, or your own gun.

So I’ve had to rewrite this review from the start, because my thoughts on this game have changed as I kept playing it, and I think it has to do with what your mindset is going into the game. Because when I think of a Puzzle-Platformer, I tend to think of something carefully-designed, where players are given all the tools they need to overcome the challenges they face, you just need to look at the puzzle the right way to find the solution. But Mosa Lina throws that all in the garbage can and runs as fast as it can in the opposite direction.

Mosa Lina tries to teach you that sometimes your challenge isn’t a perfectly-constructed and curated puzzle box. Sometimes it’s just a mess of random obstacles and objectives tossed together and you have to just deal with it. Sometimes you need to look at your tools and ask yourself not what they’re intended to do, but what they can do. Sometimes the tools you’ve been given are not just inadequate for the job, you may in fact be incapable of doing the job with the tools you have. Sometimes there’s no shame in giving up and trying all over again some other time when you’re better-equipped… or at least differently-equipped. And sometimes, the task you’ve been presented with is so daunting that there’s no shame in saying “forget this, I’m not gonna’ bother with this, let’s do something else instead”.

Mosa Lina is a messy, dumb, and often outright broken game. And that’s… intentional? Like a Roguelike, each run through the game gives you a random selection of odd gizmos that the game will cycle through three at a time in different configurations. Some of these objects’ uses aren’t obvious, and some of them can be used in odd ways, like jumping off of a flopping fish you just shot out to get a bit of extra height on a jump. For another example, the camera might seem to do nothing at first, but with experimentation you’ll find that it freezes in place objects caught within its radius. What’s more, the cartridge it shoots out when used can be stepped on to get some extra height. Or perhaps you could combine it with another tool for some other interesting uses.

The way the game encourages experimentation is one of its strongest qualities, but its lack of deliberate design can really make it frustrating too. This game can be punishingly difficult, and often the game’s design makes things worse rather than better. Your jump height is pathetically small, your tools can be unintuitive to use, and every type of tool you get has extremely limited uses, sometimes only one. You will die a lot in this game, and you will be forced to reset the level a lot (often getting a different level and different set of tools).

However, this high difficulty gets back to one of the things this game seems to be designed to teach players: there’s no shame in giving up. Playing through a rotation of levels and the last one just seems too hard? Go ahead and reroll your levels to start over from scratch. Tired of the levels the game’s designer came up with? Start up the endless mode and play procedurally-generated levels. Want that variety but with more structure? Play one of the player-created levels or create a level yourself.

The presentation here has seemingly had as little thought put into it as much the rest of the game, with graphics being just simple 2D squiggly shapes on a simple and mostly-flat background, backed by a minimalist soundtrack.

In the end, I feel like Mosa Lina is a “love it or hate it” game, and in my time playing it I’ve done a bit of both. I absolutely despised this game when I first tried it, as it absolutely fails at the basic principles of the Puzzle-Platformer genre, resulting in an overly-tough poorly-designed mess of a game.

But the more I played it, the more it became clear that the mess was the point, and it didn’t fail at those basic design principles so much as it took one look at them, pointed a rude gesture in their general direction, and made it a point to do something else entirely. And the result is a game that strikes out in its own direction in the Puzzle-Platformer genre, and offers players a clever and creative box of tools to explore it their own way, not because the game wants to give players space to figure things out on their own, but because it absolutely rejects the idea that it should even bother to think about how they should go about solving the problems it presents, or if they even can solve those problems. And while I absolutely do not think this game will be for everyone, I have to respect the drive to do something so bold and different.

tl;dr – Mosa Lina is a physics-based Puzzle-Platformer that spits in the face of genre conventions, giving players a simple task to perform and outfitting them with tools that may be wholly incapable of completing that task. it’s up to players to experiment and find unique ways to use their randomized set of tools. And sometimes players need to admit they can’t do it, give up, and try something different. This won’t be a game for everyone – some players will surely despise the high difficulty and the game’s absolute refusal to present something well thought-out and polished. But others will be absolutely delighted by the variety, wild creativity, and the bold decision to teach players the hard way that they need to be willing to admit defeat. At the very least, players craving something different in a Puzzle-Platformer should absolutely consider Mosa Lina a must-have.

Grade: B+

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