As we eagerly anticipate IGN’s Best Game of 2023 announcement, we as the Podcast Unlocked panel thought we’d tell you what we think is the best Xbox game of this year. After all, we talk about Xbox every single week, we use our Xbox’s constantly, and we’re fully immersed in the Xbox ecosystem. And so our group gathered, discussed, and debated. We’ll get to the winner in a bit, but first, here are the five games we settled on as nominees, listed in alphabetical order.
Countering "lock and key" design with hostile immersive sim Mosa Lina
29.11.2023 - 13:37 / gamedeveloper.com
"I think immersive sims started to believe their own marketing material. That never fosters creativity," says Mosa Lina developer Josh Hollendonner, explaining why he felt compelled to create what he describes as a "hostile interpretation" of the genre.
Hollendonner, who also goes by the moniker 'Stuffed Wombat' in development circles, launched Mosa Lina in October in response to the current trend of predictable "lock and key" immersive sim design.
Here, there are no premeditated solutions for players to find. Instead, they'll need to experiment with abandon by combining objects in nonsensical ways to overcome a series of physics-driven platforming puzzles across randomly generated levels. Though, as Hollendonner points out later, each stage was built using a randomly selected combination of hand-crafted content rather than procedural generation.
During an email Q&A with Game Developer, Hollendonner explained he wanted Mosa Lina to "push back" against design sensibilities that often lead players down a preset path. "[In a lot of immersive sims] I see a door and I just know, deep in my gut, that I can open it somehow. I just need to find the correct item or purchase the correct upgrade and I just get tired. It’s all mapped out for me, like a choose your own adventure book," he says.
"Instead of asking you to choose between two doors that lead to the same room, I wanted to make a game that forces you to get truly creative. So it's an 'aggressive interpretation' because it takes a direction I don't like and attacks it, trying to show that there is so much more cool stuff we could be doing."
Crucially, Hollendonner says he wanted Mosa Lina to feel "completely intrinsic." That's why he chose to shun extrinsic motivators such as meta-progression systems or in-game rewards, and notes he spent years trying to create something "people want to play with, just because they want to play with it." Mosa Lina, he says, was the first successful attempt.
Breaking down the fundamentals of Mosa Lina, Hollendonner explains the title works by placing a random level before players and then asking them to solve it using three random tools. That's it. That's the hook. It's a formula that could result in the creation of painstakingly simple levels or others that feel (and might actually be) impossible to overcome. For Hollendonner, however, that unpredictability is a thing of beauty.
"When the game launched, I genuinely didn’t know how many of the levels were unbeatable with specific combinations of tools," he says. "I just never bothered to check. That's the magic. That’s what allows you to experiment and to get creative. There's no need to feel inadequate just because you couldn't solve the world's smartest man's most convoluted
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