MOLE

MOLE is a short, strange and surprisingly gripping indie horror game with a story that punches well above its weight.

MOLE is yet another game I didn’t expect much from going in, but which, in hindsight, left me quite impressed. With a premise as simple as MOLE’s (performing a bit of maintenance on dilapidated Eastern Bloc machinery while everything keeps breaking down) you’d expect things to get boring quickly, but it couldn't be further from the truth.

The correlation between drilling and bad things happening is unmistakable. Finding the signal will spell ruin for people on the surface, and perhaps even Kaminskyi himself. But we drill anyway.

I wasn’t hating my time with MOLE. Getting from beginning to end was mostly breezy, barring a few encounters with that pointless monster. It’s just I don’t feel I got a lot of nutrition from it. While it doesn’t outright copy anyone, its adherence to its inspirations is so stark that it seems like it doesn’t have its own voice. It’s buried somewhere in there. Deep down. I’ll get my shovel.

MOLE is a psychological horror game that draws its strength from its narrative structure: the M-13 drill becomes an extension of Viktor’s fragmented mind, where past and present constantly overlap. Not everything is equally convincing, however: some puzzles feel repetitive and the pace loses its edge towards the end, dampening the tension. It remains, nonetheless, a worthwhile experience, underpinned by a highly effective atmosphere and art direction.