Off Black Creations is a Swedish game studio, consisting of four people. They stepped away from the AAA industry to explore the indie space with their concise and polished short games. MOLE is their first title, a psychological horror game involving a giant drilling vessel, published under Oro Interactive (Dead Format, Easy Delivery Co.).

This review is spoiler free, so read on happily 🙂

Digging deeper for the Motherland

Right away, I have to call attention to the lovely way they utilize the user interface (UI) in the menu of the game. While being the usual menu,  it also functions as a tutorial that teaches you some mechanics used in the game.

After fiddling with the menu, we get an expository setup, and then we are dropped in a very coherent world built using soviet era, dieselpunk aesthetics with the classic PlayStation (PSX) type textures that similar horror games tend to use nowadays. When you have learned a little bit more about cassettes and terminals, you will walk down to the “Rec room” and that’s where the horror starts.

The soviet setting works really well with the narrative. You are a cog in a giant system, and you are doing what you are told to do. In this case, that boils down to exploring, puzzle solving, switching cassettes in and out, and operating the drilling vessel. Accompanying you on this journey is a super eerie, claustrophobic atmosphere and some unexplained phenomena.

The story is a superb mystery, it will keep you guessing about where will it go and how are you actually involved in all of it. There are really effective uses of jumpscares, but the constant dread of being underground not knowing what is going on will do most of the scaring work.

Tactile mechanics, cool puzzles

I loved the small environmental stuff, like after picking up a landline, while you are holding the phone in your hand you can’t walk too far because you are anchored by the phone’s cable, so you have to put back the phone before advancing.

There were hotspots that were hard to find , so I was wandering around aimlessly for a bit before I figured out that “oh, I can pick up or click on this thing”. Some sections caught me off-guard either mechanically or navigation-wise, so I had to retry them a few times, but nothing too frustrating.

The puzzles are well thought out, with just enough hints to feel like you figured out everything on your own. Some puzzles are more like input mechanics that you will use throughout the game, but the first time you encounter them, they do feel like a brain teaser. Eventually they will become muscle memory though. I very much enjoyed these mechanics. The devs describe them as “tactile simulation elements”.  While I could imagine there are people who might deem them repetitive, I didn’t mind them at all. They made sense in their context, for example moving a control stick up and down by moving the mouse up and down while clicking on it or just simply “pushing down” on a lever using your mouse. It reminded me of the Penumbra games’ mouse gestures.

I’m very sad I can’t say more about it, but the ending was phenomenal. Coming back to the UI for a little bit, the credits are also similarly clever with it. Also don’t forget to boot the game up again after completing it for a little surprise.

Conclusion

Overall, I feel like it was a solid experience and it is well worth the 12,49€ price. It took me 3-4 hours to finish it and I’ll happily play it again to see what I missed and to understand the story more deeply (hehe). If anyone wants to scratch the same itch, there is a game called Descending on itch.io, which also has a similar premise and mechanics, though a different narrative.