This Free Indie Puzzle Game Is Getting Review Bombed For Stating Historical Facts

Mark Ffrench has cut out a fascinating niche on Steam, regularly releasing massive-canvas puzzle games in which you spend multiple hours slowly revealing enormous, fantastically detailed images. His latest, 2025: Mosaic Retrospective, is a colossal wall of Fill-a-Pix puzzles that reveal dozens of interconnected images depicting the big news stories and memorable moments of last year. And it’s currently sitting at “Mixed” reviews on Steam because, well, it doesn’t pretend that 2025 was a stellar year in the political history of America. Oh, and it’s completely excellent, free, and you should try it immediately.

Ffrench’s first foray into this type of puzzle was 2024’s Mega Mosaic, followed later the same year by Proverbs, which is—and I promise this is true—a pixel art rendering of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 painting Netherlandish Proverbs. That might sound wonderfully pretentious, largely because it very much is, and it also lends itself wonderfully to the premise: a huge mosaic-like puzzle in which you meticulously work your way through regions of the larger whole to reveal pixel pictures. Netherlandish Proverbs, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell any Dutch readers over the age of 500, is a painting showing scenes from 126 Flemish proverbs in one large composition. Completing each of the sections in Ffrench’s game pops up a text explaining the relevant tale that’s being depicted, and it’s all just completely splendid.

2024 was rounded off with 2024: Mosaic Retrospective, which has essentially the same conceit as today’s game, but featuring the events of the preceding year. 2025 gave us Mosaic of the Pharaohs, which was focused on ancient Egypt and packed with a depth of historical information, followed by the more ambitious Mosaic of the Strange that began to work in some vestigial point-and-click adventure ideas as two detectives investigated a grisly murder, with puzzles all based on conspiracy theories (it was one of the earliest Indies of the Week!).

On The Grid

© Mark Ffrench / Kotaku

2025: Mosaic Retrospective represents a return to the more “basic” approach of the games before Mosaic of the Strange, with just a single wall of images to uncover, all through a puzzle that’s like a combination of Picross and Minesweeper. Although—and I can never express this strongly enough—unlike Minesweeper it in no way relies on random luck or guessing. (I hate the awful Minesweeper for being so universally known that inevitably any game designed around revealing “mines” in three-by-three grids must be compared to it.) It is, in fact, a version of Fill-a-Pix, which you’ll be familiar with if you’re a pen-and-paper puzzling aficionado. Fill-a-Pix is a spin-off idea from the Japanese Nonogram (Picross, Pic-a-Pix), made popular by German puzzle heroes Conceptis. The idea is that within a huge grid are tiles with numbers. That number represents how many tiles are to be colored in the 3×3 grid of which they were the center. Adjacent numbers determine what can logically be filled in. If, for instance, you’ve filled in all nine cells for a “9,” and the side of this touches a “3,” that “3” is therefore complete and you can blank the rest of its cells…look, it’s a lot easier just to play.

And it’s great! It’s especially good because Ffrench has created a way to let you change the difficulty of these massive puzzles on the fly with a single click, in this case opting between Classic and Advanced, the numbers on the grids changing to create a more complicated challenge without breaking your progress. And on Advanced, this usually quite procedural puzzle type becomes a big, juicy conundrum where you need to apply advanced logic to work out which tiles to color and which to mark as blank. Each section is walled off into a peculiar shape, meaning you can eat this elephant in manageable mouthfuls, chipping away at the enormous final image while receiving regular reminders of big news events and fun viral moments from 2025. Oh, and it’s free!

I should note the Advanced difficulty option is only unlocked if you pay for the $10 “Supporter Pack,” but you’ll very much want to do that when you learn that after Valve’s tithe, all of the money is donated to UNICEF.

Extreme Leftist Narrative

© Mark Ffrench / Kotaku

Right, with it established that it’s properly good, let’s get to the juicy gossip. What on Earth is going on with that “Mixed” review score on Steam, for a series of games that has previously received Very Positive to Overwhelmingly Positive ratings? Well, it turns out it upset the poor precious snowflakes on the right, because of its…accurate descriptions of events from 2025. The bastard.

“Holy crap!” exclaims DragonEddie. “How much propaganda can you cram in a flipping video game? I just want to relax and play a game but the ‘news / headlines’ when completing a zone almost strictly propaganda…Glad the game was free because I sure wouldn’t support throwing money at this garbage.”

“The puzzles are ok,” unGlitchknown kindly admits, “but the ‘Breaking News’ as the game calls it, is all an extreme leftist narrative.”

Magnum Beef took particular exception to the depiction of Charlie Kirk’s killing. And why? Because its tasteful art and calm, truthful text described Kirk accurately. “The developer resisted the urge to make the actual visual part of it graphic or distasteful, which I applaud,” Magnum magnanimously concedes, going on to say “he focused in the description very heavily on casting Kirk as a super-controversial figure with hateful opinions and beliefs, rather than the very mainstream and normal conservative that he actually was.” Let’s read what the in-game description actually says:

“On Wednesday September 10 2025, rightwing activist and director of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, was shot in the neck in Utah. Speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University, the 31 year old was asked a question about gun violence when he was fatally shot in the neck. The shooter lay on a nearby rooftop, fleeing the scene and sparking a 33 hour manhunt, before 22-year-old suspect Tyler Robinson was eventually apprehended. Asked by his roommate about his motivation for the shooting, Robinson replied “I had enough of his hatred”. Kirk was a highly influential right wing influencer and activist, campaigning for Trump’s presidency and amassing a massive following online. Kirk regularly courted controversy, spreading conspiracy theories around the covid pandemic and the vaccine, denying the climate crisis, calling trans people ‘perverted’ and spreading unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 US election was stolen.”

I mean, you could take offense at the bizarre punctuation jazz, I suppose, but while certainly not a hagiography of Kirk, it’s hardly a tirade against him. It’s a very calm series of factual statements about the man, generously decent if anything, but failing to adhere to the post-death rules that he must only be spoken about in reverent tones. And yes, sure, you can read a left-wing bias in the phrasing, which chooses not to pretend he was a heroic intellectual who dedicated his life to bravely debating with his political opponents on college campuses, but rather gives greater emphasis to what he actually said and did in reality. But choosing to interpret covid and vaccine denial and hatred of trans people as “very mainstream and normal conservative” perhaps says more about the Steam reviewer than either the game or Kirk.

For the most part, the entries in 2025: Mosaic Retrospective are just describing events as they happened, some as serious as the China-Japan diplomatic crisis, others as trivial as Taylor Swift buying her masters or Sidney Sweeney’s controversial jeans advert. It’s stuff that happened in 2025! Weird, that.

Anyway, it’s a really good puzzle game that’ll tickle that methodically logical part of your brain, and the perfect accompaniment to watching YouTube videos or listening to a podcast. And it’s free! Couldn’t recommend it enough.