Game: Mesoké
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie
System: Steam (Windows)
Developer | Publisher: Mystik’art
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $11.99 | UK £10.75 | EU € 12,25
Release Date: May 26, 2026
Review code provided with many thanks to Mystik’art.
Mesoké is a flight simulation game. You play as a young woman meditating on an island. You experience her meditations as flights through beautiful worlds filled with items to collect.
Flying High
Mesoké was a pretty exciting game for me to pick up; it reminded me of some of my favorite games in the exploration genre, including AER: Memories of Old, Windbound, and others. Unfortunately for me, this game was a lot more Flying Neko Delivery and less AER.
It’s a shame, too; the game is absolutely stunning. The visuals are so beautiful, the collect-a-thon vibes are a lot of fun, and you get to travel between worlds with portals. The lighting is so beautiful, and the music is very relaxing. I love everything about Mesoké. Except for the flying.
The Story of Mesoké
The story of Mesoké is pretty basic; you are a girl meditating about flying through worlds. As you gather crystals and paintings in each of these worlds, you gain more and more connection to your inner, centered balance. It’s an interesting concept, giving the act of meditation a visual, a feel, and even a soundtrack.
There isn’t much more to the game’s story, but it doesn’t need more. An important part of the narrative is that you are a painter, and you collect paintings from your inner world, as if meditation helps you to come up with your masterpieces. Which is probably true; meditation has been proven by loads of studies to help with creativity and focus.
The Pros and Cons of Mesoké
I have listed out a whole bunch of things that I loved about Mesoké, and you might think that it is a perfect game for me. I liked a lot of similar, flying titles in the past, and this one is a beautiful, well-constructed world with great sound design and lots of collecting to do across a bunch of worlds.
However, the main thing you do, the main ludic interaction, is the flight. And the flight just doesn’t feel good to me. Mesoké gives you the option to play with a mouse and keyboard or with a controller, and I tried out both to see how I liked each. The keyboard version was unbearable, and the controller version was significantly better, but still did not feel great.
Tilting the kite down has you flying toward the ground at speeds that are insane, while tilting the kite up barely allows you to fly upward. There are collectable blue crystals scattered around that give you a speed boost, and there are updrafts, but none of these help the controls feel any better. You are either going so slow that you will tumble into the ground, or you’re speeding through the air so fast that you will have a very difficult time weaving in between branches or into windows.
Honestly, the flight in Mesoké feels realistic, but it doesn’t feel fun to me. I think it could be fixed by making the movement more intuitive and allowing you to climb without building speed first. And to make the flying even worse, you can’t look around. You have to move in the direction you want to look instead, like the main character doesn’t have a neck.
I found it all very frustrating. And the fact that the updrafts to help with flying were an afterthought, added after people complained about Mesoké‘s flight mechanics, makes me feel like this flying sim wasn’t QA’d very well. The portals between worlds are not very intuitive; there are no hints in the game for what to do, and a lot of things that make it make more sense seem to be afterthoughts added by developers afterwards.
Conclusion
Mesoké is a great game, let down by its main mechanic. I feel like it could be amazing with some tweaking. But as it stands, I don’t feel like it lives up to what I was hoping for.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure.
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