While I certainly hadn’t planned for it to be this way, it seems that this year’s Spooky Month is all about indie horror games! And to cap it off, I’m talking about a more recent indie horror game, MOLE! It’s funny, I didn’t at all plan for this either but DreadOut and Five Nights at Freddy’s both came out in 2014 while Silver Pines and MOLE came out in 2026. Got to love unintentional themes! That being said, MOLE actually has a lot more in common with Five Nights at Freddy’s than it does with Silver Pines. But I’m getting ahead of myself!

MOLE is a psychological horror game about digging. And specifically digging with a massive drill you pilot from the inside. The game is set in a fictional Slavic country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this world, it seems that rather than governments wanting to go to the moon, they instead wanted to dig deep into the Earth! Something that would end up having dire consequences. MOLE is actually a very story driven game so I am going to try and keep a lot of the details on the brief side but I do at least want to provide some context to what is happening to hopefully hook some people in!

You play as a man named Viktor, the drill’s navigator and one of the four manning said drill. This drilling operation is not being done out of curiosity but out of desperation. Deep below the Earth, deeper than any previous expedition has ever gone, there is a signal. Said signal is faint but can be noticed up on the surface. This has led to lots of problems. People exposed to the signal start feeling side effects with the biggest being not only seeing dead loved ones but having them speak. It’s wide spread enough that you even find signs telling people not to listen to the dead! This is later dubbed Signal Sickness, and along with the signal affecting power and other things, this is the main reason for the dangerous expedition. To reach the signal, find out what it is, and stop it. And of course, things don’t go well.

You wake up in your cabin on the driller after a dream that helps explain why Viktor is on this expedition to begin with. And already things have gone off the rails. I’ll come back to this wake up section in a bit when I talk more about the game play but for now I want to continue with the set up of the game!

After getting out of your cabin, you find that you are already in the middle of the trip down but things seem to be in disarray. Checking a message left to you by command, they haven’t been able to get any contact from the driller and you for awhile and are currently fearing the worst. Something that absolutely makes sense given you find the body of one of your crewmates on the way down to the cockpit and they had a rather gruesome death…

On the way down you’ll be able to see a lot of different fliers and notes talking about the world and the expedition. Like a lot of games, this is where you get a lot of your background and lore so I highly recommend checking them out! While the game paints a picture that time is of the essence, it actually isn’t right now. And the game will absolutely make sure you know when you truly are on a timer! So don’t be afraid to take the time to really absorb the atmosphere of this tight driller and the world around it. Trying to reach the cockpit will be a lot easier said than done as well and this is when MOLE reveals that it is actually something of a puzzle game.

While I wouldn’t say the puzzles are the main aspect of the game, they are plentiful enough to mention them at least! The game actually kind of starts with one back when you wake up in your cabin.

After the dream, you’ll be awoken by the alarm clock in your cabin. However, things are very dark and blurry when you first get up, so much so you might not even realize you have control at this point. This is one of the very cool visual things that MOLE does! Viktor wears glasses and when he doesn’t have them on he has trouble seeing, obviously. And as most people don’t sleep with their glasses on, the first thing you need to do is find Viktor’s glasses in order to see again. Surprisingly, this is not a one time gimmick!

After getting your glasses, turning on the lights, and turning off your alarm clock, you are introduced to a big part of the game. Cassette tapes! To exit the cabin, you need to put a cassette tape into the reader by the door. And specifically, the Orange #4 cassette tape. It’s currently plugged into the computer in your cabin. Taking time to actually read the screen will reveal that this is Viktor’s cassette tape specifically, which is why it’s used for his cabin door. You can also read up on Viktor if you want here!

This is the game teaching you a very key component of it. Cassettes are a big deal. They are used like keys and are needed for certain actions on the drill. For example, to get the message from command, you need to use the message cassette and place it in the reader so it can copy over the message and you can read it on the monitor in the messaging room. While they are mostly used for progression blockers, certain cassettes will be used for piloting the drill! Which is arguably the main part of the game.

When you first reach the cockpit, the monitors will tell you what you need to do to get things back on track. You’ll need to get the current navigation data which comes from a cassette tape of its own. Getting said tape however does reveal another big aspect of the game.

After unlocking the cockpit door to go find the tape, you’ll notice the way back is different. There are some floors and grass on the ground and the walls have changed too. Walking deeper in, it looks like you’re in a class room, one specifically teaching about how to use the navigation tape. Like I said, this is another big part of the game, the hallucinations. This appears to be the class room that Viktor learned in and it serves as not only a great unsettling moment but a way to explain things to the player without it feeling weird to explain to a navigator how to do their job. This also teaches the player that things might not always be as they appear, something that was alluded to early on when talking about what the signal does to people.

Back in the cockpit though, you have what you need to get back on track! I’m not going over the process beat for beat but it is a process you will be getting very familiar with in your playthrough as the drill will be getting off course far more than once. After getting the autopilot all set up though, you can hear the phone in the nearby office ringing with the screen on the phone letting you know it’s an internal call. Turns out it’s from the drill’s Geologist! Not only is he alive but he has discovered something. He wants you to come to his room but before hanging up tells you that something else is in the ship, something hostile…

Heading back upstairs to the rooms, you’ll be making your way to the Geologist before suddenly being attacked! You can’t get a great look at the monster right now as you need to run but the chase section itself is pretty quick as you run into a bathroom that very much wasn’t there before. Inside, after putting your glasses back on, you are greeted by a new voice, one that wants to help you and seems to know a lot about Viktor already.

This is where I am going to stop discussing the story! I was very surprised by just how story driven the game is. Thankfully it is a good story, a sad one but a good one, so I don’t want to spoil it here. And while you could argue that the story is the biggest driving force to keep playing, MOLE has plenty of game play to really keep you going!

The game kind of goes in waves from here. You wake back up in your room before getting out and learning what new thing you need to do in order to get the drill moving again. And while this always ends with you back in the cockpit like before, you will always need to do something new before that. Often times involving you doing some puzzles to figure out what’s wrong! This is how the game helps you to learn all these systems without it feeling too repetitive as it leads up to one of the bigger moments of the game.

Like I mentioned before, your goal is to set the drill up with the right coordinates and turn on the autopilot. However, as things get worse, the autopilot stops being an option. This leads to you having to manually pilot the drill yourself with a time limit too! This is the part of the game that actually reminds me of Five Nights at Freddy’s. All the systems you have been learning throughout the game come into play here. So similar to keeping an eye out for killer animatronics, you now have to juggle piloting the drill, getting new data, and sometimes blowing away some tough rocks blocking your path. This might honestly be my favorite part of the game! It was stressful in all the right ways without being too overbearing that I got frustrated. Each time a new wrench was thrown into the mix I was obviously frustrated but more with the situation rather than the game or its mechanics. It’s a great sequence that I could gush more about but I don’t want to spoil some of the surprises it throws in. However, with that being said, this sequence isn’t exactly scary despite being a horror game. So let’s talk some about the actual scares of the game!

Despite how easy it would have been to make this game nothing but a bunch of jump scares, MOLE is surprisingly a lot more reserved with its scares. Granted, there are still some jump scares here and there, but still!

A lot of MOLE‘s scares are psychological and wrapped up in the mystery of what is going on. The most unnerving bits actually happen outside of the drill itself, well technically at least. The game is basically broken up into parts. Usually you’ll start out each part with figuring out what’s wrong with the drill, fixing it, and then setting up the autopilot. After that though, the game will have you experiencing some hallucinations again. This is where I felt the most vulnerable. Despite my claustrophobia I felt much safer inside of the drill! It was a familiar place after all. This is why these sections work so well. They take you out of the one place you might actually feel comfortable in the game and drop you into somewhere anything can seemingly happen.

These sections are actually from Viktor’s past, something that isn’t really a spoiler as they game pretty clearly explains this. This is where you can start to piece together what happened to him and why he’s really on this expedition. They also serve as a break from the usual landscape you are familiar with inside the drill itself!

These aren’t the only sections designed to scary you, though. Like I mentioned already, there is a monster on the drill that is after Viktor and that brief chase scene before wasn’t a one off. Thankfully this game is one of the very few that I feel does chase scenes right! First and foremost, MOLE doesn’t have too many chase scenes. This helps keep them not only fresh but also scary! Not only that, they aren’t extremely difficult. While the scenes aren’t just set dressing, you can very much die in them, I only managed to die once in all of them and that was despite being very careful! They also manage to not feel repetitive. Each time there is a chase scene you are generally doing something different, besides just running I mean. And when you do need to do something in the middle of these scenes, you are told what to do not only clearly but organically too! So that one time I did die in a chase scene honestly felt justified. And this way I didn’t have to die multiple times before realizing where I needed to go or what to do.

The chase scenes are honestly a pretty minor part of the game overall but I really wanted to highlight how good they are! It is so rare to find a horror game that manages to do chase scenes right, as you may have already been able to tell given how much I’ve complained about them in the past. So I have to give credit where it is due when someone actually manages to do them right.

I’m honestly surprised I’ve made it this far into the review without actually bringing up the visuals! They aren’t anything crazy or super stylish but they work very well for this game. MOLE goes for something closer to PS1 style visuals but more polished than anything you’d find in an actual PS1 game. Again, nothing to really write home about but still very fitting for the game!

The sound design is also in a similar boat. While nothing blew my mind I never felt that anything was out of place or annoying. There were a few times when I was focused on looking at a computer screen and some spooky noises were happening just out of frame but I’m not sure if that was intentional or just a happy accident with the ambient noises from the drill itself. Either way, it really worked!

And that’s about it for MOLE! …Or it would be if it wasn’t for the fact that, while in the middle of writing this review, the developers dropped a big new update completely free that adds an extra mode to the game!

I’m going to keep this section pretty brief! Partly because this new mode is a massive spoiler and one you rightfully only unlock after beating the main game but also because I just haven’t had much time to play it. Endless Salvation is basically an, as you probably guessed, endless game mode that takes place after the main game. You remember when I mentioned that one section of the main game where you need to juggle all the mechanics of piloting and navigating? Yeah, it’s basically that but now it’s not just one segment, it’s a whole additional mode!

Though describing it like that really isn’t doing it justice. Endless Salvation has an entirely new drill that is designed to be used by a single person and completely new systems for running it. The devs really went all out on this mode and it is great! I’ve currently only played it for a bit but even then I can say that if you enjoyed the section of the game where you had to pilot it all on your own then you will absolutely love this new mode! And the extra story and lore poured into it really is the icing on top.

To round things off though, I should end with a bit of criticism. While there really isn’t much I disliked about MOLE, I can see its length being an issue for some. Similar to Five Nights at Freddy’s, MOLE is another game you can absolutely finish in a sitting. However unlike Five Nights at Freddy’s, MOLE is $13 and not $5. And while that new endless mode does help extend that play time, that is only if you enjoyed actually manning the drill. If you preferred just the story bits you aren’t going to get much out of it.

Personally, the core game is good enough for me to justify that price point but I know that might not be the case for some people. So you might want to wait for a sale before picking it up!

Regardless, MOLE truly is a great horror game! One that doesn’t really fit in a single genre of horror with its multiple game play sections and story, and I like that about the game. It might be short but it manages to pack a lot in there despite it so it never manages to get stale. So if you’re looking for a very unique experience to end off Spooky Month with, I highly recommend giving it a go!

And with that, Spooky Month has come to an end for another year. I had a ton of fun, like always, covering all the games this month! Did you have a good Spooky Month though? What games did you play? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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