From the monotony of working life to soccer fields: two mobile games to "escape" from reality

SOCIABLE SOCCER – Before FIFA and PES, the derby for the best simulated soccer game was between Kick Off is Sensible Soccer. We are talking about the pre-Colombian period of video games, when the PlayStation did not exist and the players were solitary nerds in front of the Amiga 500. A small piece of that golden age is present in Sociable Soccer, which was created by one of the authors of Sensible Soccer (Jon Hare, for those who remember sleepless nights).

Sociable Soccer was born as a fast, immediate and intuitive soccer game on mobile: actually, the short tutorial explains everything there is to know and in a few minutes we will be ready to take the field both in single player, with a giant league to beat and climb all uphill, and for online battles. The control system foresees being able to manage the ball in a "sensitive" way even with the touch screen, although sometimes you get tangled with your fingers in an attempt to give an effect to the ball or throw the final lob over the defense.

Good graphic quality, licenses completely absent – so expect players with particularly imaginative names and teams that remember the real name (Botton is the Juve goalkeeper, and Inter has the Nerazzurri badge but it's called Milan). There is also the possibility to exchange, find and buy "cards" with the players to forge a more and more powerful personal team, and even to connect two controllers to the iPhone / iPad / Apple TV for a friendly match with a meat opponent. bones. Applause for the sole arbiter of the game, reminiscent of Collina.

Sociable Soccer is available on iOS devices and is included in the subscription to the Apple Arcade platform.

MOSAIC – Daily life, in all its grayness and its horror. You get up in the morning, check your phone as soon as you wake up, make the slalom between the spam messages and the emails of the boss who constantly scolds you, then go out and go to work. From the elevator to the street, they are all with noses tucked into the smartphone screen, and no one seems to notice that you exist. Then one day, the goldfish starts talking to you and makes you discover that behind those single-color buildings there is a colorful world.

Mosaic is an "exploratory" game: you go around the anonymous city, driving a character literally without a name, trying to get out of the wheel set by the system, to unhinge the system and its will to pigeonhole us as a small cog among the thousands that move in unison. Not a tremendously original theme, it is clear: indeed, to be honest Mosaic is too "predictable": if they all go to one side, the "solution" is to go to the other. If there is a single crack in the palisade, that's where you have to look.

IS halfway between an adventure, where you have to experiment with the available actions, check in every corner, look for junctions and hidden objects, and a walking game, where essentially one walks and goes around, admiring the Kafkaesque scenery. After half an hour you will play, you will feel a little uneasy about repeating the actions day after day, waiting for that "variation" that heralds – finally – the discovery of what lies behind the game and the routine. Don't worry, that discomfort is wanted. Strange things will start to happen, and then the game gets more interesting.

Mosaic will be available from December 5 also on Steam for about 20 euros: on the iPhone it has already been released and is included in Apple Arcade, Apple's service, in the 5 euros per month required by the subscription.

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