Apple Arcade - The Mosaic (2019) [/]
Apr 17 2023
In The Mosaic you play a young adult who is beaten down by the drudgery of work. Each day you go to work and do a work mini-game. But as the next day unfolds things start to change a bit. You get to see more of the dreary world but you also get to experience a few bright moments before you get to work and do the mini-game, which also changes as your mood changes. Still, not a particularly interesting game.
I ended up spending several hours on the second mini-game, which is a phone game called BlipBlop and you can pretty much call it up whenever and play a bit. It's tap (blip) to get energy (blops) then when you have enough energy you can upgrade three items: how much energy each tap gives you, an auto-energy collector and how much capacity it has, speed up auto-energy collection.
When you get to level 100 you can collect Prestige which resets you back to level 1 and no upgrades but now you have a 20% blip bonus (which increases as you keep collecting Prestige). Meanwhile there is also a ten second 45% bonus when you level up and a frenzy bonus if you tap fast enough, something like +35% after 30 seconds and +70% after a minute which resets if you stop tapping quickly.
It's a pointless game and yet addictive as I can tap while watching Twitch or whatever. All of the 29 Game Center achievements are related to BlipBlop. The highest level is Prestige 10 times which seems doable in four days. But then there's collect 1T blops (luckily the counter never resets after collecting Prestige) which seems impossible as I've only gotten like 100M blops after a day. A really clever way to keep engagement for OCD users.
I'm writing this review so I can delete this game and not be tempted by BlipBlop, perhaps the most idealized simplified version of a constant dopamine-hit game.
I ended up spending several hours on the second mini-game, which is a phone game called BlipBlop and you can pretty much call it up whenever and play a bit. It's tap (blip) to get energy (blops) then when you have enough energy you can upgrade three items: how much energy each tap gives you, an auto-energy collector and how much capacity it has, speed up auto-energy collection.
When you get to level 100 you can collect Prestige which resets you back to level 1 and no upgrades but now you have a 20% blip bonus (which increases as you keep collecting Prestige). Meanwhile there is also a ten second 45% bonus when you level up and a frenzy bonus if you tap fast enough, something like +35% after 30 seconds and +70% after a minute which resets if you stop tapping quickly.
It's a pointless game and yet addictive as I can tap while watching Twitch or whatever. All of the 29 Game Center achievements are related to BlipBlop. The highest level is Prestige 10 times which seems doable in four days. But then there's collect 1T blops (luckily the counter never resets after collecting Prestige) which seems impossible as I've only gotten like 100M blops after a day. A really clever way to keep engagement for OCD users.
I'm writing this review so I can delete this game and not be tempted by BlipBlop, perhaps the most idealized simplified version of a constant dopamine-hit game.