Very cool!
The visuals look familiar, perhaps I've seen it in a games magazine as a child... in any case this looks like quite a sophisticated game for its time!
But no, we didn't think too much about previous games when conceptualizing MS. The inspiration came from the 2017 theme of Print Screen Festival, where we created the game. You can read more about it via the links in the game description here. If anything, the game was originally conceived as something more akin to David OReilly's Everything, but with breeding mechanics instead of embodiment mechanics. During the jam we let the art style that developed influence the gameplay and simplify it, and this is the result.