Mosaique Neko Waifus 4 – what a title. A French word followed by a Japanese word followed by anime slang for your favorite 2D female crush. Let’s call it MNW4 for short. Available on PC via Steam.
MNW4 is a puzzle game with extraordinarily light elements of a dating sim and visual novel. If lewd anime catgirl pictures are the cheesecake (and they most certainly are), then the “dating sim” aspect of the game is just the syrup drizzled on the top for presentation.
The game features four catgirls with various hair colors and styles that match their tails, and each puzzle features them in increasingly lewd outfits or poses as you progress from the first, easiest puzzle with the most modest outfit, to the most complicated puzzle at the end in the most scandalous pose and outfit available. Puzzles are completed by left clicking and right clicking to rotate the pieces, all of which are squares of various sizes, into the correct direction so that the image lines up correctly for your ogling pleasure.
I am above making a joke about only needing one hand to play this game, but I am not above making sure I that mention it here.
As you rotate puzzle pieces into place, you gain experience points and level up, which gives you an ability point that you can put into various skills with silly names like “Love Sparkle” or “Chocolate Airstrike.” These skills can be activated on command or randomly, depending on the skill, to give various positive effects to your puzzle, like orienting puzzle pieces correctly, or showing you which pieces you still have wrong. Once a puzzle is complete, you can view it in a gallery if you want to just admire your waifu of choice without any of that pesky puzzle solving getting in the way of your viewing pleasure. Upon completion, you also have a two- or three-line conversation with the catgirl where she will give you an item like a bottle of water, or condoms, or ice cream, for some reason. The rewards give bonuses to your abilities, increasing their effectiveness.
The dialogue is meaningless. Your choices do not change the outfit or pose in the next puzzle, or even the dialogue after you complete it. It just serves as a mechanism for you to choose a reward. After you have chosen your bottle of water, condoms, or ice cream, you can replay the puzzle two more times to get the other rewards.
Despite being developed by Lil Hentai games, by default, MNW4 does not really have hentai unless you grab the free 18+ DLC that is not included by default. Without this, the images are certainly lewd and teasing, but avoid anything all that explicit. Oddly, though, if you do not pick up the 18+ DLC, you actually miss out on nearly half of the game’s content. The default game comes with 18 puzzles, and the adult themed DLC adds an additional 14. Most of the people buying this game probably fully intend to make it as adult themed as possible, but if for some reason you were not, know you are missing a sizable chunk of content.
Lastly, while this is my first dip into the catgirl puzzle game swimming pool, I did check out the Steam pages for MNW1, 2, and 3, and while 1 seems to be similar in content to 4, 4 is significantly less explicit than 2 and 3, which seems to have included images with multiple girls or even penetration. This game features strictly solo images of the waifus, so if you were expecting something more hardcore like the previous titles, you will not find it here.
Otherwise, this game is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be, and at a very cheap price.
Score – 7/10 – Review code supplied by developer.
