Publisher: Oro Interactive
Developer: Off Black Creations
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Price: $12.99
The internet has seemingly branded MOLE as "the next Mouthwashing," or at the very least, a comparable experience.
I can't fathom why people think that. Sure, MOLE is claustrophobic at times...but at other times it's about as wide open as can be. Sure, the story has some excellent emotional turns...but it doesn't have a strong cast of characters to carry those turns. Sure, it also has weak horror gameplay segments...but the segments in MOLE are both weak and generic, whereas Mouthwashing's segments are merely weak.
I don't hate this game...in fact, I liked an awful lot of it in spite of itself. But to call it the next Mouthwashing or even 2026's best horror game (as some have said) is beyond strange to me.
With that in mind, let's now turn our attention away from comparisons and towards MOLE in a vacuum.
In the world of MOLE, there's a mysterious signal radiating from deep within the Earth. This "white rabbit" signal is causing all manner of catastrophes on the surface, so people are naturally hoping to find the source and stop it. And in a fictional soviet nation, a ragtag crew from a scummy corporation is trying to achieve just that!
To this end, that corporation launches an underground drilling vessel referred to as "MOLE." You are Viktor Kaminskyi: the MOLE's navigator. Viktor is evidently the greatest navigator in the whole world, as the company hires him for the job despite the alcoholism he's been fighting since his son's death.
Would you believe me if I said that MOLE's narrative overcomes the bog-standardness of that particular overdone character backstory? This is because its presentation is second to none as far as indie horror goes.
That, and the writing is paradoxically excellent despite its characters being flat as cardboard.
Unlike other narratives like this, MOLE doesn't just say "dead kid" and pull up the "cry" cue cards for us. It doesn't say "boy, that Viktor sure has been an alcoholic since his son died!"
No. Instead, it does things that put us in Viktor's shoes. For example, showing his glasses coming off and the screen starting to get blurry as he listens to an old casette tape. It's pretty much all showing, and high-quality, cinematic showing at that.
Certain cutscenes are far more powerful than they would be in the hands of lesser developers for sure. I can't say that MOLE ever made me cry or stuck around in my soul or anything like that. But it did get me a bit choked up at times specifically because of the work this team did on how they delivered the story. So, props there!
The analog puzzles mostly revolve around your ship duties. You'll have to go through increasingly more convoluted ways to find coordinates for the MOLE, with each step necessitating manually flipping a bunch of switches and knick knacks. It feels awesome from an immersion perspective, and some of those more convoluted puzzles got audible "YES"s out of me when I figured them out. The solutions are "out there" enough to feel like an educated gamble, so you end up feeling accomplished despite the fact that you ultimately just followed the bread crumbs.
The final "puzzle" in particular has stuck with me as a prime example of how to massively ramp up difficulty in a way that feels right.
But for an idea of how lame the horror segments are, just look up the monster you have to contend with.
They simply did. not. try.
One segment sees you in a cerebral chase sequence where you're running away from the monster in a hallway of doors. Another sees you walking around a spooooooky abandoned hospital interacting with brain-bendy events until you magically open up the correct room. Another sees you trapped in a "weeping angels" scenario with the monster, all the while you have to solve a puzzle.
One of those was a lie. But I bet you wouldn't be able to guess which one, since they're all equally generic at this point.
Sadly, it's not a lie to say that MOLE has some roughness around the edges. The biggest problem I encountered was a bug where a fuse didn't spawn for a puzzle. I ended up having to look up the solution after being stuck for a while, and that's when I realized the issue. There are also some audio bugs, such as an odd skip in the music during the emotional climax. Audio bugs aren't typically the end of the world, but consistency in this department matters for an experience that banks on immersion as much as this one does.
MOLE is an unfortunate case of hindsight spoiling things for me. I remember enjoying it in the moment, but it just doesn't hold up as well now that I've had some time to reflect.
Regardless, the story alone is worth the price of admission, as is about half of the gameplay experience. It's just that the other half is an unoriginal slog.
Overall, I'd say it's good but not great, I suppose.
If you're looking to break into psychological horror, this might be a good gateway drug for you. You won't have seen hundreds upon hundreds of psychological horror chase sequences already, at least.
With the smaller game scale applied, let us review:
Boring horror sequences - 2.0
Technical problems - 1.0
The final score for MOLE is...
7.0/10 - Good
Publisher: lemorion_1224
Developer: lemorion_1224
Platform: Microsoft Windows
Price: $5.99
And now for something completely different. A Right Trigger first, in fact.
For you see...I've never reviewed a multiplayer game before. I hate multiplayer games. Multiplayer is where creative vision goes to die. It's the structural equivalent of those split-screen videos where one side is Subway Surfers or Kingdom Run or whatever the hell it is and the other side is an AI voice reading reddit threads. Multiplayer games only really exist to sell microtransactions and get attention from streamers.
With all those opinions out in the open, it should come as no surprise that I avoid these titles like the plague and mute game announcements on livestreams when it turns out they aren't single-player.
But if you follow literally any streamer on YouTube these days, you can't avoid Meccha Chameleon. This breakout hit from an evidently two-person Japanese dev team is everywhere. I personally have been watching penguinz0's nightly videos about it recently...and it has looked like a blast every single time. So much of a blast, in fact, that we find ourselves where we currently are.
Every. Day. No matter any of our respective ages.
That's because there's something about "Hide and Seek" that makes the human brain happy. There's this inherent thrill to giving another person the slip. And that, dear reader, is the central thrill of Meccha Chameleon.
Meccha Chameleon, in case you're bad with context clues, is "Hide and Seek." But there's a twist: you paint yourself to blend in with the environment. So it isn't so much about hiding as it is finding somewhere in plain sight in a level that you think you can disappear in.
This could be as simple as going up to a yellow balloon on the ground, curling into a little ball, and painting yourself the same shade of yellow to try and pass as a second balloon.
It could be slightly more complex, like standing up against a brick wall, painting yourself the same shade of maroon or red, then using white paint to imitate the white lines you're covering.
Or it could be as ridiculously complicated as standing up against a painting and matching the part of the painting you're covering exactly.
Further fleshing this system out is the ability to make up to 2 clones to form more complex shapes.
So the only limits to what you can achieve are your imagination and your ability to work fast.
You'll notice I didn't list "painting talent" as a limit. This is because I have none...yet I still have a staple hiding place I'm yet to be found in...despite it being a completely out in the open solid black paint job against a red or yellow background.
Here's how it works. You join either a public or private server and congregate in a lobby. The host of the server then chooses the map, the game mode, and the allotted hiding time before the hunter ("seeker") joins the fray.
If you're the hunter, you simply continue to wait in the lobby for the allotted hiding time. Once that time is up, you scour the level looking for anything that looks slightly off. If you see through another player's disguise, you shoot them to "find" them.
If you're a hider, you load into the map and go find your spot before the hiding time runs out. You can still move around and paint when the hunter spawns in, but obviously you run the risk of being discovered that way.
Once the hunter joins the game, a new timer starts to count down (usually around 300ish seconds, though that seems to be variable). This is the overall timer, and at this point, it's the hiding team versus the hunting team.
In the "basic" mode, being spotted and shot means you're out, and you spend the rest of the round spectating. You can also see the rest of the hiders, admire their work, and avoid overcrowding an area.
In the much more popular "infection" mode, there's one hunter at the start, but if they shoot you, you join them in hunting. Because of this, you can't see your fellow hiders...so it's possible someone could have the exact same spot as you and you wouldn't know it unless you went to check your spot again after being found.
There are other modes, but honestly, I've never been in a lobby that used them. So, that's that!
If you're a hider, it's worth noting that you aren't just waiting around the whole time with nothing to do. You have a whistle you can use to taunt the hunter(s) if they miss you. As for why you'd want to do this (other than the fact that it's more fun to actively give them the slip), there's "missed spot points."
If you enter a hunter's line of sight without being shot, you earn anywhere between (as far as I can tell) 3 and 45 "missed spot points" depending on the distance between you and the time they spend looking your way. These get added up in a ranked leaderboard that updates in realtime for the hiders and on a delay for the hunters. For the hiders, it serves as a way to measure just how good a job you did (as well as a hell of a bragging rights generator). For the hunters, it serves as an extra layer of taunting as they wonder where this person they've evidently been staring directly at is.
Once a round is over, there's a half-minute bit of time where every hiding space is revealed for everyone's review. People who were found have their spots highlighted in blue, while people who remained unseen the whole time are highlighted in red. During this time, the hunters usually go looking for red highlights to see how people avoided them. Regardless of your role, this time also gives you the opportunity to award one "eeyan" to a hider of your choice. An "eeyan" is just a "like" to show that you thought their spot was the best. This is an entirely optional aspect to engage in, but awarding these shows another player that you recognize their talent.
Once you're awarded an eeyan, your total count is displayed above your head by your nameplate. So if you see someone with a high thumbs-up count above their head in your lobby, you know you're up against a professional.
I can tell you right now, getting an eeyan at the end of a round is a rush I haven't found many places this year.
Honestly, I think I enjoy Meccha Chameleon so much because I have a higher amount of eeyans than the average I typically see in any lobby. Despite having no painting skills to speak of, it would indeed appear that I'm good at this game...who wouldn't enjoy a game they're good at?
That said, if I can manage it with my lack of both painting skills and mouse/keyboard skils, you can find some rounds you excel in too! And there's nothing like it, especially if you did a terrible job!
I remember one round where I was in a level with a small staircase with scattered ceramic penguin heads on it. I curled up into a ball, painted myself the penguin head color, created a clone and kinda moved it around to make my form look less like a ball, and used a tiny dab of black paint to make a little eye on the side. It was truly terrible.
Yet, the hunter spent a great deal of time frustratedly trying to find me in that room, some times standing right on top of me looking at me for a moment (skyrocketing me to the top of the missed spot leaderboard in the process). I would whistle at him every time he left and draw him right back in, but it took him a while to give up. When the round ended, the guy immediately headed for that room, saw where I was, unmuted his mic just to say "no F***ING way, bro...", and gave me an eeyan.
It. Felt. AWESOME.
Another example is when I hid just by sitting in a chair, painting myself the chair's color, and putting a little bit of black and a little bit of white on my head to mimic the little button I was covering. This was an "infection" round and I was the last man standing. So I ended up with something like 9 hunters in my room as the last 30 seconds rolled around. They still weren't finding me after I opened up the text chat and wrote "ain't no way..." as an additional taunt. So it was a similar story as the last one, except when the round ended it was 9 hunters looking at me, one mic unmuting to say "you're kidding...", and multiple eeyans headed my way.
That was one of two rounds (in different lobbies, obviously) I won with that spot. And my worst spot by far has won me more rounds than that.
Because I don't want to give that one away, one last different example was a round in a country-themed level with a couple horse statues. I sat my character down on the back of one of those horses and painted a little cowboy costume on myself in hopes that nobody would bat an eye despite the contrasting colors. I didn't win that round, but I did make it to the last 45 seconds with quite a few missed spot points racked up...and one or two eeyans as well.
Trust me, you can do some disgustingly terrible work and still get away with it! And that's when it's the most gratifying!
You may be wondering how it's possible that hiding jobs as terrible as these can sometimes succeed. Well, remember, time is limited for the hunters once they're in. But levels are also pretty damn huge, too, and hiders are typically pretty small. So, a hunter needs to cover a large area if they want to win, and this doesn't usually afford them the ability to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb. Panic undoubtedly sets in too, making them sloppy. You also can't truly realize how effective even the worst paint job is until you see it for yourself. Just in your head, you wouldn't expect it to work that well, but it really does.
On one side of the spectrum (giving examples I personally experienced), you're likely to see the hard "r" n-word more than a couple times in text chat. You'll also probably hear the occasional kid who likes to trash talk while he's supposed to be cleaning his room. Or you might end up in a lobby with a guy who spams the text chat with very specific threats of sexual violence. So if you wouldn't survive in a 2000's CoD lobby, you're probably going to have a hard time surviving this one as well. There's no profanity filtering whatsoever here, so you're going to see whatever anyone else wants you to see.
On the other side, though, you'll have people welcoming new players with open arms or interacting with you in fun ways. There was one lobby I was waiting in where the host refused to start the game for something like 10 minutes, so eventually I walked up to the start button and passive aggressively painted my character with an arrow pointing to the button and the letter "E" in quotations. At that point, another fed up player joined me on the opposite side of the button with further instructions painted on their person.
Then, you'll sometimes find people who are just bizarre...like the guy I was in a lobby with who unmuted his mic just to make a noise like he was explosively shitting himself, start crying, and mute himself again for the remainder of the game.
Sadly, with those negative specimens, there's no way to kick them out of a server.
If you, for example, have a server member who utilizes some of the game's known glitched spots, the host will basically just have to shut the server down or hope the offending player gets tired of being abused in chat.
Those glitched spots have been around for as long as the game has been out, so they still haven't been addressed despite multiple updates having been released. And while the vast majority of players have seemingly agreed never to use those, you'll occasionally stumble across a server where someone doesn't want to play fair. Once you realize someone has done that, it kind of spoils the whole round.
While toxic players are something of a rarity, what isn't remotely a rarity is absent hosts. You'll join a lobby with a full roster of players ready to go, but more often than not the host simply won't start the game for some reason. It's seriously 9 times out of 10, and I can't fathom why it happens. Do they just go AFK? I don't know. But I've pulled that passive aggressive arrow-painting maneuver no less than 5 times, and it never actually works, so that seems to imply that people are just starting servers and leaving.
Even when you get into a match, there are times where the servers are unstable enough that they just collapse before the round even starts. This almost always happens before a round, thankfully. I only had it happen during a round once, and that sucked.
That all probably sounds pretty horrible...and it is. Once you find a lobby that doesn't suck, you can ride that out for at least an hour usually...but you'll sadly spend most of your time with Meccha Chameleon just waiting to play it.
Beyond this issue, you'll also likely experience framerate issues in lobbies with more than 10 players.
Finally, there's the eyedropper inconsistency. There are plenty of ways in which you can set the paint color you want to use, but the most useful tool is the eyedropper. When using it, you can hover the mouse over anything in the environment and press the space bar to copy the thing's color. This is how you get the exact right shades...or, well, how you're supposed to. It can be a little finnicky, so sometimes you'll have to try it a couple times to get the exact shade instead of a similar shade. It's more of a minor annoyance than anything game-breaking since it usually gets fixed within a few tries, but it's worth noting.
But make no mistake: Meccha Chameleon is an absolute triumph, and it comes to us from an itsy-bitsy team that clearly had no clue they were making the single most popular 2026 game this side of GTA 6. If you haven't already picked it up, this is your sign to do so!
Let us review:
Tech and server problems - 1.0
The final score for Meccha Chameleon is...
9.0/10 - Fantastic
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts? Questions? Think I'm full of it?