You only need to press the start button to know Mister Mosquito graduated from an era of PlayStation that’s long been lost. As the camera pans around the densely detailed exterior of the Yamada family’s estate, a dramatic voice over does its best David Attenborough impression, describing the precarious lifecycle of a mosquito. Your goal in this stealth-style flight sim is to survive a single summer, feeding on the aforementioned family to sustain your poignantly short lifecycle.
The gameplay is unlike anything you’ve experienced before or since; perhaps a contemporary point of reference could be IO Interactive’s recent Hitman trilogy, where characters all have patterns you can interrupt by interacting with the environment. Each stage sees you buzz around a beautifully mundane scene, with that hazy look that defined the PS2 era. You can turn on radios or switch off televisions to affect the patterns of your targets, creating windows to land on their skin and suck their blood.
While it doesn’t play anywhere near as antiquated as you may anticipate, actually drawing blood by rotating the right analogue stick doesn’t exactly feel comfortable; you need to keep your cursor in the sweet spot by altering the speed of your cycles, otherwise you’ll get detected and swatted. You can, of course, always fly away and return to your target when things have calmed down, but a lot of the replayability comes from time attack, so you want to be as prompt as possible.
This game is weird and a product of its time; one level sees you sucking blood from one of the family members while they’re taking a bath. The cut-scenes, which introduce each stage, are also utterly bizarre – owing to some awful English voice acting. One sees the matriarch of the Yamada family throwing a tantrum because her daughter doesn’t want to appear in a photograph with her. It’s barmy, weird stuff.
But it’s this type of boundless creativity that many feel PlayStation is missing these days. Sony may have lifted the overall quality of its output, but it’s come at the expense of unbridled oddities like this; a game that, when considered critically, is barely above average – but ends up more memorable than the latest AAA fancy purely because of the sheer insanity of it all.