Mole is a short but haunting horror game about digging up things best left buried

Mole launched last month on Steam for $13 — a four-hour first-person horror game set aboard a Soviet-style deep-bore drilling vessel, and one of the more unsettling indie releases to slip out quietly this year.

You play as Viktor Kaminskyi, a navigator and pilot who has signed on to drill through the Earth's crust in search of the Signal — a mysterious, undefinable broadcast that is slowly driving the surface population mad with visions of the dead. Viktor's crewmates are on board for humanity's sake; Viktor is there entirely for himself, chasing a personal redemption that comes at someone else's expense. The game draws obvious comparisons to Event Horizon and Iron Lung — claustrophobic, oppressive, and deeply uncomfortable in the best way. There are a few puzzles, some genuinely terrifying chase sequences, light gore, and a set of satisfyingly clunky retro computers to interact with, but Mole is primarily a story game. The post-WWII, non-specific Slavic aesthetic does heavy lifting throughout, making the vessel feel like a coffin with a drill attached.

Mole sits in a well-worn corner of indie horror — the short, narrative-first walking sim with teeth — but it earns its place there. The genre has produced standouts like Soma and Signalis in recent years, games that use horror as a delivery mechanism for genuinely difficult moral questions rather than just jump scares. Mole is working in that same space, and the reviewer notes that Viktor's moral position — a man who did everything right and lost everything anyway, now doing something very wrong to get it back — is compelling enough that they found themselves rooting for him despite knowing better.

At $13 for roughly four hours, the value question is fair to raise. But the review makes a strong case that Mole's staying power outlasts its runtime — the questions it leaves behind linger well after the credits roll, and whether Viktor's choices were justified doesn't resolve cleanly. If you have an afternoon and a tolerance for existential dread, it's worth the dig.