Maybe this is nostalgia speaking, but given the touchscreen-centric world that we live in, I yearn for the days of clacky buttons and big dials. As much as it’s convenient to have things like remote controls, there was a simple pleasure of going up to my grandma’s TV to turn the dial and adjust the antenna as I sat down to tune into a night of television.
MOLE, a new psychological horror game from Off Black Creations, fully delivers on this feeling, throwing you onto a Slavic post-war drilling machine with gloriously retro buttons and levers for you to play with, while managing to deliver a first-person, psychological horror story.
You play a navigator onboard a deep-bore vessel that’s in a fight for survival to keep the colossal machine and the mission going. Set in an alternate 1980s, it’s a world where a calamity has struck the world, and the answer lies deep below the ground. Following in the footsteps of a previous mission, you and your crew are trying to reach the source of a strange signal, one that seems to be having a disastrous effect on your mental state as you go further and further from humanity.
While you don’t interact with your crew in person, MOLE finds other ways to dig into its main character and interesting world. Without getting too much into it, it quickly becomes clear that the reason you are on this mission is to help pay off medical debt accrued after your son passed away.
It’s a heavy topic, but it adds a deep layer of grief to this cosmic horror adjacent setup, making it feel more nuanced in the process. Even though you don’t dig too much into other characters on the vessel, there’s a lot to chew on exploring the protagonist’s damaged psyche as the Signal gets its claws in him.
A Retro-Futuristic Drilling Vessel with Personality
The majority of the game takes place on the vessel, which is nicely rendered in a low-fi art style that brings home its retro aesthetic. This place is cramped, rusty, and moments away from falling apart, but it’s brought to life by 80s-style mechanical interfaces. Big CRT monitors, reel-to-reel tapes, and manual controls immediately convey the world it’s trying to create. There’s a unique focus on cartridges that are used for everything from room keys to data storage, making for a unique hook that makes the setting feel so much more alive and distinct. Even the game’s opening menu forces you to interact with these cartridges to start the game, weaving it thoroughly into the DNA of the experience.
Breaking up the time on the ship are flashback sequences that show you elements of your tragic life before taking this doomed mission. The closer you get to the Signal, the more past and present start to bleed into each other, transitioning to flashbacks in a surreal fashion, often mixing hallucinations with fact. After spending so much of the early portion of the game on the vessel, it felt like other locations were nice little surprises to keep me on my toes. It’s an effective storytelling technique that not only enhances the dread of the current situation but also effortlessly fills in the character’s backstory.
Both of these settings work in concert to deftly control the pacing and tone. The feeling of the vessel is so claustrophobic and catastrophic, with extremely cramped corridors to navigate and even tighter vents to call through. One nice mechanical touch is that you have to keep re-pressing forward to continue crawling rather than just continually holding it, emulating the feeling of squeezing yourself through an impossibly small space.
When you go to more traditional spaces in the flashbacks, it should feel like a relief to be in a wider space, but the somber and occasionally horrifying tone of these flashbacks does not allow you a moment of emotional respite. Constantly shifting across the many tones of the feel-bad spectrum keeps the game consistent without getting exhausted by just one.
Why MOLE‘s Process-Driven Puzzles Are So Satisfying
All the narrative elements are strong, but what makes this game work so much for me is the tactile nature of its puzzles. You feel like an operator on this massive, old vessel, desperately following step-by-step directions to interact with the many interfaces that keep it (just barely) running. Directions are often presented diagetically, with in-universe signs next to various stations that walk you through each switch flip and button press in a way that still leaves room for you to figure things out. The most satisfying part of it all is that many of these interactions require you to do the mouse movement to turn a dial or pull a lever, making it feel immersive in a very hands-on way.
To give you an example, one of the first things you’ll have to do is restore the lights in the floor you’re on (the game will not let you pass through dark spaces, making this a clever gating mechanic) by interacting with a fusebox. There are four slots, one for each of the four floors, and you pop in the one fuse you have into the correct floor. You then need to set the dial to the number of fuses installed, hold a button for a few seconds, flip four out of the eight switches, then pull a lever. It’s nothing overly difficult, but you end up doing it so many times that the first time you do it without referencing the instruction panel, it gives you the satisfying feeling of pattern recognition.
Since your role on the vessel is pilot, the most complicated recurring task in front of you is setting the navigation. It’s a multi-stage process that involves moving a cassette from console to console and dialling in a bunch of different values based on terminal readings. I love having a process-focused game like this that really puts you in the shoes of the role through its mechanics, and this one feels really great because of how tactile things are.
The important part about setting up a process-focused game like this is finding ways of meaningfully escalating things, and MOLE does a good job of forcing you to do these tasks under pressure as the game goes on. It’s the perfect way to reward mastery, making it feel like a satisfying flex of your skills to punch in the navigation sequence or swap out fuses while time is of the essence. It finds smart ways of taking the very specific interaction models they’ve built and adding tension within that framework, rather than adding other mechanics in a way that would feel out of place or extraneous to the scope of the game.
Chase Sequences Undermine Some of the Game’s Strongest Ideas
One element of tension that was less successful for me was the chase sequences in the game. Since this is a horror game, it goes without saying that there’s a threat aboard this vessel, but personally, it didn’t feel like it belonged in the game as much.
Getting chased by monsters in a horror game is a mixed bag sometimes, because the line between scary and frustrating can be crossed very quickly. The first time it showed up, it was a nice surprise that got a jump scare out of me, and I was able to make it to safety before it caught me, which felt tense and exciting.
Near the end of the game, there’s an extended sequence where you’re pursued by the same enemy, but this one was less successful for me. The area you’re being chased through, which starts to get surreal, is very dark in a way that hampered my ability to get through without being caught. I would get to an intersection, and would barely be able to see which way was a viable path forward.
After failing here a couple of times, I actually ended up changing the game’s brightness setting from 1.4 to 2.8 to give me even a fighting chance to make my way to safety. This was an example of that mechanic crossing over into frustration, as I found myself saying “oh come on” out loud anytime I took a wrong turn because I couldn’t see. It’s good in theory, but the actual context of how it plays out is lacking in execution.
A Powerful Psychological Horror Story That Occasionally Overstays Its Welcome
By the end of the game, I found myself really impressed with the way it explored some really deep themes within the context of its contained story. Ultimately, MOLE is a tale of grief and loss, examining the lengths we go to hold onto the past and the terrible effect it can have on our mental state if not done in a healthy manner. The surreal flashbacks put you directly in the shoes of a man going through the horrific loss, allowing you to figure out the exact circumstances of your son’s death, making it feel all the more tragic as you put together what’s going on. It’s not entirely novel, but the way it’s presented feels like it adds to the overall effect.
Some of these sequences went on a little too long, dampening their impact, and sometimes the surrealism felt a little too much like it was reaching for symbolism rather than focusing on the situation at hand, but overall, the narrative is definitely one of the game’s strengths. MOLE runs about four and a half hours, and it’s possible that trimming a bit off that runtime would have benefited it in both focus and pacing.
Scenes like standing in a phone booth making tough calls stand out in my mind way more than surreal chases through shifting landscapes, and a bit of editing might have been able to keep the focus on the former while still making the right amount of space for the latter.
Despite having some gripes with the pacing and chase sequences, MOLE was a surprisingly rich experience that I finished in about two sittings. Its setting feels so lived in and well thought out, allowing the drama that unfolds to feel real and grounded, even when things slip towards cosmic horror. While it wanders a bit in the climax of the story, it wraps up in a satisfying manner, with a great credits sequence that brings everything to a strong close.
The immersive, process-focused puzzles draw you in, putting you directly in the shoes of a tragic character caught in a horrific situation. Fans of games like Mouthwashing and Iron Lung should definitely take notice, because MOLE is another great psychological horror game for you to dig into.
Code provided by publisher. MOLE will release June 15 on Steam.
