Mister Mosquito Review

I always heard of this game being brought up, over the years I would randomly see it get mentioned as one of those really "weird" games that is unique and should be experienced, and it popped in Playstation Premium Classics recently so I decided to play it.

Mister Mosquito is certainly a unique game, the best way of describing it is that what if games like Hitman and Untilted Goose Game gave the player the ability to fly and the whole point of the game is to be an annoying pest like in the latter game? It's esstentially Mister Mosquito. In a lot of ways, it can be considered a stealth puzzle game of sorts.

The first offputting thing about the game is that there is no tutorial that I am able to find and as a result, I had no idea what the controls and level objectives even were, this could potentially ruin the game for first time players, I was almost considering quitting but after I looked up some the controls and what you are supposed to do during the levels, everything became much more enjoyable.

The flight controls do take some getting used and I had to invert the camera in the PS5 emulation control settings. You may need to adjust more than just that depending on your prefrences.

What makes Mister Mosquito a "stealth" game of sorts is that the whole point of the game is to suck blood from the various npcs inside certain rooms of their house without being spotted and without them noticing that you are sucking their blood like an actual mosquito. You have to suck certain amounts of blood from the npcs in every level in order to complete them. You also have to avoid getting into their line of sight and alerting them to your presence, while also activating parts of the environment in order to have the npc reveal certain body parts to suck off of, and suck blood using a right analog stick mini game before you get smacked all though PS5 rewind does arguably makes the mini games loose their tension since you can rewind and undo swat you could get.

When you do get caught, it's not all doom and gloom, you just need to hit certain pressure points while avoid the npcs' attacks and the game will reset itself back to stealth and them being unware.

And even more of a surprise there is an actual story and campaign in Mister Mosquito, both do a good enough job at feeling decently fleshed out especially for a game that you might think wouldn't even have one. The story does a good enough job at feeling fuffling, how the family gets more and more annoyed by the antics you do in the levels and how the stakes slowly start to ramp up.

This is where the structure of the campaign comes in, for a game that is about less than 2 hours, it's pretty varied you got multiple blood sucking points, npcs being aware of your presence the more the game goes on, different environment hazards, different ways in order for blood sucking points, and different animations to watch out for in order for blood suck points to pop up.

It's a well made campaign for what it is.

However some issues with the game are the same levels get reused a little too much for my liking, the level objectives did change, but appearing in the same rooms constantly did start to get a little old since I got tired of seeing the same scenery which while "fine" wasn't great enough to make me want to see them multiple times.

The contextual blood sucking animation to activate the mini game can be a little too inconsistent, I'm not sure if it's positioning, but sometimes I felt like I should've been able to activate the mini game and at other times the player mosquito character would just bump into the npc body part and it wouldn't activate.

Final complaint is that the penultimate level can jump the shark a little too much, you have an npc that suddenly has superpowers in a game which seemingly has a grounded everyday setting, you can argue it's part of the game's over the top tone, but personally I feel like a normal everyday family where a husband has superpowers is silly on top of the fact that the projectiles for his attacks feel like I have to be super lucky to dodge and the controls weren't precise enough for me to cosistently avoid the attacks. They either felt like they were hitscan or just moves to fast for me to even see or the controls were good enough for me to move quick. If it weren't for PS5 save states and rewind, I got a feeling I could've dropped the game here.

Overall, Mister Mosquito certainly does live up to it's reputation of being a quirky cult classic, I didn't even know what I was expecting going in but I turned out to enjoy a lot more than I ever thought I would.