It’s getting hot in here. With every passing second, the enormous drill that you pilot ploughs through more layers of sedimentary crust and towards the Earth’s core. You don’t know why you’re doing it, at least not to begin with, but you know that you’re the last chance we have to save the planet. You must succeed where none have before. You must drill down nearly eight kilometres as the sole remaining crew member of this accursed vessel. Most importantly, you must stay sane while you do so.
Mole is ostensibly a game about digging. On the surface (or, more accurately, beneath it), you’re piloting an enormous, obtuse drill through rock and soil to reach your intended depth. But as your vehicle ploughs its way through the Earth’s crust, you also dig into your own past and uncover the deepest secrets of your psyche. Sanity holds on by a thread. The past refuses to stay buried. And still, you dig deeper.
If there is such a thing as a tutorial, Mole developer Off Black Creations has never encountered one. You wake up to a blaring alarm and a gut-wrenching hangover in complete darkness. There’s a blur to your right, it looks like a digital alarm clock, but you can’t make out the numbers. Hitting it does nothing. Getting up is a miracle of spamming inputs until the player character does something, before another light catches your eye. This one is on a desk—still blurred—on which you make out simple shapes. A note. A newspaper. Glasses. Ha.
The world comes into focus when you put on your glasses, or at least the illuminated desk and alarm clock are visible. But your aided vision makes out a switch on the wall, which sheds light on your depressing existence. Here you are, navigating a gargantuan piece of machinery to save the world from… Something, and your claustrophobic dorm is filled with discarded bottles that go some way to explaining the pain in your head and nausea in your stomach.
Mole doesn’t make life any easier for you. Its controls are unintuitive, but that’s the point. You’re supposed to already know what you’re doing. You’re supposed to have this all memorised already. You’re the mission’s navigator, after all. Instead of being presented as part of the game’s UI, any instructions are written diegetically, and not always where you expect. Using the navigation tools—you know, the core part of your job—requires interacting with four different instruments, a cassette tape, two keypads, and various levers and joysticks, all of which you have to work out how to use with little guidance. It’s an arduous process to adjust the course even a little, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Every element of your vehicle’s controls is incredibly tactile. Every heavy lever grinds into place, every button pushed has a satisfying thunk followed by a glowing light to show you’ve completed the correct series of actions. It’s incredibly satisfying and, in another timeline, Mole would have made an excellent dystopian digging simulator. You start to learn the tools of your trade, the rhythm of the machinery becomes as natural as the creaks in the metal that protects you from being crushed to a bloody smear in the centre of the Earth. And just as you get the hang of things, a fuse blows and you have to descend into the bowels of your craft to get the power back on. You began this game in darkness, and in darkness you are again.
Mole borrows liberally from Mouthwashing, the seminal psychological horror game from Wrong Organ that puts you on board a cursed spacecraft transporting mouthwash across the galaxy. Mole, too, involves a decrepit vehicle realised in an art style that evokes PS2-era games, although this time it’s an abominable inversion of an iconic Thunderbirds rescue vehicle rather than an hellish spacecraft.
Mole’s timeline, like Mouthwashing’s, is fragmented, and both deliver chilling, psychological narratives. Mole never quite reaches the highs of its inspirator when it comes to its plot, but it comfortably matches the terror. Mole goes harder on the jumpscares, freakish creatures, and horror tropes, but its scariest moments are more human, delivered through a brooding atmosphere rather than gory monster jaws to the face.
Flickering lights. Crawling through narrow vents. Strange noises that hint at something else living in this vehicle with you. Not your crew, they’re all dead. These are classic horror tropes that are executed well, shining brightest when they interplay with your vehicle’s systems. All your navigational knowledge goes out the window as soon as you’re trying to bring the engine back online while something chases you through the corridors. That being said, these tropes outstay their welcome.
At times, Mole is reminiscent of a single-player Among Us. Instead of a betrayal, however, the thing that hunts you is monstrous, gory, terrifying. Instead of cartoonish characters, you squint at pixelated shadows and ‘00s textures, trying to work out if that door has always looked like that, if you’re going crazy, or if you’re inadvertently staring down the maw of a ravenous killer. As the game goes on, your tasks become more frequent and varied. And, of course, the conditions under which you must complete them become increasingly strenuous.
All the best horror stories are grounded in something deeply personal, and Mole offers the very same. The difference here is that, once you’ve found this grounded, personal tragedy, it forces you to dig deeper and deeper still, until the true crux becomes apparent.
However, the story shocks more than it truly chills. There’s a heartbreaking tale at the core of this game, but Mole seems more insistent to provide jumpscares and low poly gore than letting tension build and allowing the grim story to take centre stage. It’s a game that wants so desperately to be scary that you save by taking a drag on a cigarette. At times, it feels like a teenager’s expectation of what a horror game should be, which is a stark contrast to the mature and delicate story it tries to tell.
Mole is a lesson in atmospheric storytelling and design. An overreliance on horror cliches holds the game back from truly pushing any boundaries within the burgeoning microgenre of Mouthwashinglikes, but piloting the drill with its clunky, obtuse controls is a tactile dream and reliving our protagonist’s trauma as they attempt to hold onto their sanity as their world collapses around them is deeply unsettling.
Many games have utilised this low poly aesthetic for horror shenanigans in recent years, and Mole is a worthy addition to that canon. However, it leans too hard on horror cliches where it should instead focus on its protagonist’s heartwrenching personal trauma, which is far more powerful than any blood spatter or face-chewing monster could dream of being.
