…well, why don’t you watch me play for a while? I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

As you can see, I’m playing as a mosquito trying to stock up on blood from the members of a Japanese family.

You seem to be flying erratically. Have you been consuming blood with high alcohol content?

The flight controls are a bit unpolished. The mosquito’s turning radius is oddly large, so it’s difficult to point him where you want him to go, which causes most of the game’s difficulty spikes. Your targets are also pretty narrow - you can only suck blood from designated body areas, and if the humans spot you, you have to crash into designated pressure points to calm them down.

How can Mister Mosquito suck blood in the first place? Only female mosquitos have the necessary proboscis specializations to consume blood - they need the proteins for egg production. This game is not a very accurate simulation. There’s also no reason for Mister Mosquito to be peeping on a human female in the bath.

Well, that’s just it - to a mosquito, a teenage girl in the bath is no different from a middle-aged man on the couch. But to the human player, acting as an intruder in the family home and sneaking up on people as they perform everyday activities, the game has a consistent voyeuristic undertone. Certainly the level where you must suck blood from the bathing daughter is the most blatant example, but even preying on the mother while she looks for an old photo album or the father while he relaxes by watching TV is oddly intimate - these scenes of normal family life are not found in most games.

The humans seem to be getting angrier the more Mister Mosquito feeds on them. Is he truly just stocking up on blood, or is he destroying this family for his own amusement?

They aren’t taking it very well, are they? The between-level family dialog scenes are endearingly bizarre, but as the game progresses they spend less time talking about banal family matters and more time snapping at each other over their frustration with their growing number of mosquito bites and escalating attempts to rid themselves of the pest. It’s hard not to be simultaneously amused and horrified at the impact you’re having as a tiny insect.

It seems the father in particular is becoming completely unhinged. Perhaps you should hit his pressure points more.

Perhaps!

So this is a game about being a mosquito, invading the home of an average Japanese family, and stealthily sucking their blood.

Exactly right!