If you had the chance to undo a past mistake, but you knew you’d hurt someone else in the process, would you still do it?
Perhaps that’s too vague a question, as it’s impossible to calculate the opportunity cost of two unknown sums. How badly would the person in question be hurt, and is their suffering comparable to what you’d get in return? At what point does your selfish gain outweigh the cost another would pay on your behalf?
Released last month on Steam, Mole is a game about digging up the past, but more so for the player than the player character. Viktor Kaminskyi, the navigator and pilot onboard the deep-bore vessel on which Mole is set, knows what he’s signed himself up for, and what—or rather, who—he has to sacrifice to achieve his goal.
It’s difficult to talk about any story-focused game without ruining it, but Mole feels especially impossible to discuss in this regard. It’s a four-hour-ish first-person horror game about a man tasked with drilling through the Earth’s crust in a bid to locate the origin of the Signal, an undefinable, mysterious broadcast that is slowly turning the populace above ground mad by showing them visions of the dead. Think Event Horizon meets Iron Lung. To tell you much else would spoil the fun—and by “fun,” I mean “pants-shitting horror.”
Mole really distinguishes itself in its presentation. The post-WWII, non-specific Slavic setting is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, as the Soviet-style vessel you occupy feels appropriately foreboding and coffin-like. There is some gore, and a couple of genuinely terrifying chase sequences, but Mole mostly wants to freak you out by forcing you to push forward into what you perceive as the unknown, and what Viktor perceives as his salvation.
Viktor is a man who did everything right, and had everything taken away from him in return. He doesn’t deserve the hand that life ultimately dealt him, and he puts himself aboard the drilling machine, which he shares with three other crewmates, in an attempt to rectify this injustice. While Viktor’s colleagues are attempting to find the Signal for the sake of humanity, Mole makes it clear from the outset that Viktor’s search for its origin is purely selfish. He’s not a bad person, but he is doing a very, very bad thing. Yet, incredibly, I still found myself rooting for him.
Those moral considerations are all well and good, you may be thinking, but is Mole fun? Not really, not in the traditional sense at least, but then, fun doesn’t seem to be Mole‘s goal. At the end of the day, it’s a story driven game with a few puzzles to tackle and some very satisfyingly click-clacky retro computers to mess around with, and it’s one of the best examples of such a game in the horror genre.
If $13 sounds a bit steep to you for a four-hour-long game, I understand. However, the questions Mole left me with once its credits rolled have stayed with me far beyond its playtime. Even after seeing the conclusion to Viktor’s story myself, I can’t quite figure out if what he did was justified, nor can I figure out what I would have done if I was in his position. Mole may have only spent four hours on my computer screen, but it’s spent a whole day burrowing around inside my head.