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MOLE Review
- Taylor Rioux
- Jun 5
- 7 min read
Editor's Note: Major plot details are discussed during this review. If you do not want to be spoiled, please come back after beating the game. |
Wake up.
The alarm is blaring, and I try to look around a bit to see if anything is visible amongst the darkness. The player character — Viktor Kaminskyi, the navigator of this boring vessel — opens his eyes, revealing only fuzzy red lines visible at an indeterminate distance. We reach for the alarm, pressing it to turn off the incessant buzzing, before turning and fumbling toward a pair of glasses atop an illuminated desk. Finally, we can see.
As we turn on the lights, the room becomes clear: a small space in a seemingly decrepit vehicle that houses personal effects and a sort of retro-futurist assortment of technology, including cassette tapes and monitors used as both information devices and locking mechanisms. Interacting with every object requires a tactile touch; the manual turning of knobs, the deliberate insertion of a key into its corresponding lock — each element intended for the player to inhabit the body of Kaminskyi as much as the mind.
Publisher: Oro Interactive Developer: Off Black Creations Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released June 15, 2026, for PC (Steam). |
And what a mind it is! Kaminskyi is plagued by voices and visions, subjecting the player to the inner workings of a man broken by tragedy and circumstance. Forced into medical debt due to his dying son’s hospital bills, the navigator finds himself delving into the abyss in search of a signal. This signal causes a form of madness in all who hear it — though the ways that madness manifests, and just how susceptible one is to it, vary from person to person.
It won’t take long to recognize things are amiss. After turning the lights on in the Rec room, players can see a dead body on the floor with a screwdriver jammed into its mangled form. The lights also reveal a kitchen, with newspaper clippings, furniture, and other items — each telling its own story — filling the space in a way that makes it feel lived-in.
Those clippings are short blurbs that detail the impetus for the journey we are on, and do plenty for developing both the atmosphere and the stakes, telling us just enough to make the importance and necessity of the mission known, all while leaving space for players to fill in the gaps. The unknown calls to us, prodding the spirit of curiosity laid within. I want to know what’s down here, I want to know what the signal is, and I want to know what comes next.
In the beginning, the ship lies empty, leaving only the player character to traverse the dorms, the rec room, and the comms room in search of clues as to what has transpired and what must ensue. These opening moments set the tone, with cramped hallways and extreme darkness working in tandem to create those feelings of claustrophobia, isolation, and uncertainty horror connoisseurs are so accustomed to, but MOLE’s execution of them is superb, thanks in large part to the monster that prowls the ship in search of Kaminskyi.
I am astonished at the way MOLE uses perspective and imagery to tell its story.
A phone call rings out, and another crew member tells us to meet them in their quarters, but the lights have gone out. The phenomenal deployment of sound and lighting here elicits that aforementioned dread and uncertainty, as the creaks and groans of the ship, plus some unknown banging, ring throughout the now-darkened space. Something is going to happen. I know it, you know it, Kaminskyi knows it — we just don’t know what.
So when we approach the crewmember’s cabin and a monster pops out, it may feel somewhat expected, but the violence and speed with which it happens calls for immediate reaction. The only option is to run, but with the space now being nearly pitch black, fleeing becomes a tense affair. “Where do I run? What do I do?” — questions that must be answered through action within seconds lest we be grabbed by the monster, a second of which leads to an instant game over.
These encounters with the monster are among the most tense in the entire game, but are done sparingly. Despite this, the mere threat of their appearance adds tension to every moment. It’s hard to say when the monster will come back, and escaping it is often more than a simple matter of running away. Later encounters involve navigating pitch-black areas and solving puzzles, forcing players to make use of their minds to escape. Can you remember the route to the exit, and can you recall the sequence needed to unlock the doors?
There is a feeling created by its mere existence that changes the tenor of every new interaction. A checkpoint and autosave notification should be a relief, but when I saw it, I was driven to fear instead. Sure, there is safety in the existence of a return point, but by showing itself now, I had to wonder why the checkpoint appeared at all. Would the monster return? Would I need to escape? I would then have to prepare, recounting my route or the sequencing of button presses needed to complete a nearby task — all simply because the monster might appear in those dark, cramped hallways.
Oftentimes, this was not the case. The monster may not have appeared, and the checkpoint was a simple safety net for some other reason, but this was no comfort in the moment. The fear remained.
But the darkness does more than hide monsters; it also obfuscates the space itself. There are moments when walking through the passageways that Kaminskyi and the players find themselves in new, seemingly impossible spaces. Paths that formerly led to the rec area now lead into an empty classroom with windows looking outside on a sunny day, or a door that was once an exit from the cockpit now brings us into an elevator to Kaminskyi’s past apartment. These spaces and pathways are ephemeral, disappearing just as quickly as they appeared.
These fleeting rooms, combined with the voices and other visions, are reminders that Kaminskyi is unwell, but the question is not “is all of this real,” but “how much of this is real?” When bodies and objects shift or disappear, doubt is sown. Are we experiencing an episode now, or did we have one before? How much of this is because of the signal, and how much is because of Kaminskyi himself? Where does one begin and the other end?
Virginia Woolf, in her essay On Being Ill says,
“In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other — a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause — which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow.”
Kaminskyi seems to have fully embodied this sentiment, with the voice's words becoming true in a way that feels entirely real to the player and to the avatar of our interaction. These visions are just as affecting and just as deadly as any moment in the real world. We experience the events emotionally in a way that a rote recounting of words could never dream of matching, with Kamisky’s thoughts, memories, and emotions coloring this world in patterns that may seem incomprehensible to the sane, but coalesce into a richer picture with a full understanding of the story.
Every hallucination and each line of dialogue is laden with meaning, but in some respects, it can create even more questions. Kaminskyi’s decision to board this vessel to earn funds and pay back the debt related to the end-of-life care for his now-dead son carries with it some uncertainty of its own, requiring further interrogation. As the disembodied voice promises to reunite the navigator with his son, one has to wonder just how much Kaminskyi is in control of his actions.
Every time we drill deeper, new messages are delivered from the surface, warnings about continuing to drill deeper and finding the signal source are given, and eventually, the mission is cancelled altogether — a demand that is promptly ignored. We can see new bodies of crewmembers piling up on the ship as our journey continues, and while we do not know the specifics of their demise, we press on, excavating ever further into the abyss. 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 don't see this as Kaminskyi being controlled. I barely see it as manipulation. He is desperate. He wants nothing more than to see his son again, a son he feels that he has failed, and would do anything to see that through. I think Kaminskyi knows just how unlikely it is that the voice would bring Petro back, but even that sliver of hope is enough to try, world be damned.
I suppose this would be the part where I should excoriate the reasoning, where I should denounce the thought of lighting the world on fire for one child. I find myself unable to do so. For all the faulty logic behind it, Kaminskyi’s journey is one I would likely mirror in the same situation.
It feels like a cheap trick to pull at one's heartstrings like this, to find connection in the desperate struggle of parenthood, yet I found it all the same. I would give anything to see my son live and do anything to see him shine. The thought of losing him is unbearable, impossible. I relate in more ways than I probably should, and that’s scary, too. Horror shines a mirror unto us.
I suppose this would be the part where I should excoriate the reasoning, where I should denounce the thought of lighting the world on fire for one child. I find myself unable to do so.
In the end, the player and Kaminskyi succeed at finding the signal. Through desperate trials of ingenuity and memorization, we dig, and dig, and dig, until the light shines upon us. Of course, the voice reveals one last trick, convincing Kaminskyi to sacrifice his son’s digitized consciousness to record the signal on the cassette Petro was held within, and killing Kaminskyi in the process. Despite this, the voice does keep at least one part of its initial promise.
Wake up.
This time, the alarm blares only after we awake to sunlight streaming through the windows. There is a gentleness to the scenery and music that we have not felt before, a quiet comfort of seeing Kaminskyi’s old home in the daylight, Petros toys peppering the floor. We see a life well-lived, with awards and pictures hung upon the walls. When we push Kaminskyi through the front door, we see Petro in full as he swings below a massive tree; reunited at last.
Verdict  |
Image Credits: Oro Interactive via JetsonPlaysGames
Disclaimer: A copy of this game was provided to us by the publisher.
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