Mole (2026): The Art of Digging Deep

It’s time for the Pumpkin Holidays, better known beyond the western border of our post-socialist homeland as Halloween! A time of unrestrained enjoyment of horror content of all kinds and forms. As the main gamer of this magazine, today I will tell you about one of the most interesting novelties of this year – an indie horror in retro style, called the Mole.

For me personally, this game is a real gift. I really like modern horror movies in this style. They are something like the films produced by studio A24: aesthetic, innovative and with obligatory overtones. But they all have a problem: they are very short. Mouthwashing and Iron Lung are the closest to today’s topic: both of them last no more than a full-length film, and the second is generally much shorter than its own film adaptation. Yes, horror films are intimate, but such a short timekeeping and very conditional gameplay does not allow the suspense to “brew”. And it’s impossible to dive into the very interesting lore of such projects in a short time. And the Mole has enough gameplay and enough time to tell his story.

According to the advertising thesis, it is easy to confuse the Mole with another subgenre (but definitely not the acid Western “Mole” by Jodorowsky!). As I call it, the horror of working under stressful conditions. The most striking representative of this is the wonderful Voices of the Void. And such associations clearly played against the Mole, because not everyone wants to dive deep into the routine as a vacation, and even waiting for the inevitable screamers.

In fact, this game perfectly balances between a mystical story and getting into the skin of the main character through gameplay. What is this game about?

Accepting unacceptable losses

The main character’s name is Victor Lazarsky and he is a geonaut. Well, like an astronaut, but not up, but down. Together with three other chosen daredevils on a tiny autonomous drilling rig, which is called a Mole, your goal is to get to the source of abnormal activity deep in the earth’s crust. The goal is not strictly scientific: the homeland of the characters was struck by a cascade of disasters called “Matryoshka”. The authorities assume that the destruction of the source can stop the coming cataclysms.

For Victor, the disaster turned out to be as personal as possible. His only son died from the effects of the destruction. But this is not a story about revenge, but about the hope of resurrection. Taking advantage of the achievements of experimental medicine of the Vostok project, Victor saves a digital copy of his son’s consciousness. And the voice from the depths, which whispers a compassionate anomaly promises to bring his son back to life.

We can all guess how good an idea it is to listen to otherworldly voices from the depths. And these guesses are complemented by dead colleagues, hallucinations of the main character and, of course, the monster that lurks on board the underground ship. How about monsters in a confined space?

Imported Soviet nostalgia

Another inaccuracy that is present in the promotional materials for the game is that the Mole is a Soviet expedition. It is as Soviet as the universe of Self-assembly: the roots and inspiration are obvious, but all the characters and countries are fictional. And they are fictional, interestingly, by people not from the CIS. It all looks extremely interesting. From a national point of view, the characters are conventional Eastern Europeans: they speak Polish, write in Ukrainian, and their names are often Russian. From an economic point of view, this is also not exactly the Soviet Union, even at the end of the eighties: the market economy is present and allows, for example, the main character to get into huge debts to pay for a dubious medical procedure for his son.

There is also a curious mix of beliefs: Orthodox eight-pointed crosses and icons are juxtaposed not only with excerpts from the Catholic Bible, but also with socialist red stars. They are adjacent, not mutually exclusive. At the same time, all the necessary pathos of the socialist conquerors of unexplored distances (here the depths) is organically present and not to say that it is ridiculed.

This kind of cranberry is the opposite. Not negative tall tales about a real country, but completely neutral ones about a fictional country. It’s not an ideal country, but it’s not a caricature of an evil empire with billions of people tortured in a local gulag. Yes, the country is in crisis, but it is not of a political or economic nature.

The Nevris SSR, as it is called here, cannot be called backward either. Modern computers with a cassette-card cartridge data storage system look adequate to the timeline of this world. In some ways, the setting is similar to the Soviet republic from the Fallout world, but about twenty years before the active nuclear conflict.

With your own hands

You will have to live the story in this curious world literally at your fingertips. Tactile controls with multiple sequential actions for each puzzle are very useful here. The tasks here are not difficult at all, but due to the lack of obvious hints, markers and other nonsense, each of them is perceived as a small personal victory.

The attention to detail is pleasing, not in the form of useless interactivity, but rather like Chekhov’s guns in every location. If you can go somewhere, then it’s not for nothing. If there is nothing there, then it will be later. And Victor also wears glasses not only for the image of a simple Navris engineer.

At the same time, this meticulousness does not become stuffy. I will immediately dispel two concerns. Yes, there will be a temporary section, but it’s not too complicated. And yes, of course there will be catch-up with the monster, but also within the bounds of decency.

***

Out of the entire array of modern low-poly horror stories, which are very easy to get confused in, you should choose Mole as the perfect balance between narrative and gameplay. A chamber story in a confined space, like in Mouthwashing, tactility, like in Amnesia, and a prickly visual, like in Mike Strawberry’s games. It’s also a rare story in the genre about a man who achieved his goal rather than being a victim. But with good intentions, it’s better not to dig too deep.