First Time Completion: Mole Mania (Game Boy)

Mole Mania was one of the many impulse purchases during my childhood years. I got it from some electronic store in my neighborhood that's not defunct or at least don't carry games anymore. I really liked the game, and I found only found out a year or two ago from hardcoregaming101 that it was developed by sir Miyamoto (of Mario and Zelda fame). The game is about a mole trying to rescue his wife and kids. In order to do so, he has to use his wits as he goes through room after room of puzzles and beat a boss at the end of a level.  I enjoyed it since I'm still a biased Nintendo fan at heart, and respect Miyamoto's work. However, I did never manage to finish it. For a cutesy kind of game, the puzzles are hard, and eventually got stuck on the last levels. I tried and tried for hours, but my little brain couldn't figure out the solution, and was not aware of gamefaqs back in the late 90s. Even if I did know the site, there was no complete FAQ of it until late 2004. Back in May, I felt like starting again, and get to the end. I managed to do complete this feat, and you know what, the game is still hard.

Playing Mole Mania at my age worked to my advantage at least where I can see and picked up the solutions almost instantly and blazed through the first half with relative ease. The puzzles were real simple in the beginning, but they gradually get harder, and towards the end, get very brutal. The puzzle themselves consist of rooms where Mr. Mole need to bring an iron ball towards the gate that blocks the next room. (As shown in the screenshot to the right) There are various tricks and tools at your disposal such as digging, underground travel and throwing. The task gets increasingly harder and complex as more obstacles get thrown at you. By the last 2 levels (out of 7 total plus a boss gauntlet), some puzzles were major headscratchers that can take me 30 minutes - 1 hour to figure it out. Many of the later puzzles require digging specific holes, move objects to certain positions, and/or have to do a series of steps in exact order. Sometimes, perfect timing is needed for certain objects needing to be in place at the precise moment. Messing up in any way makes you restart the room over, and some puzzles require a lot of very careful steps to get to the solution.  Occasionally, some puzzles thrown at you are stupidly easy in between the nightmare ones, but I guess the intention to give players some break from the nasty puzzles. There is an item on each level that lets you skip a puzzle once, though marked as incomplete, but felt compelled to finish all of them. I still did wind up using a FAQ for some of the puzzles in the last level because they were that evil to me.

I struggled with the game even as an adult, but I've beaten it, had fun and felt great satisfaction beating the puzzles. It just was a bit surprising that it is hard even as an adult, let alone for kids. It's just one of the many instances of how hard older games, whether artificially or not, back than compared to know, but that's a rant for another time. The game aged quite well, and is easy to hop right in and enjoy. Just don't expect it to be a cakewalk after a while. The game is evil in spite of how it looks, and is interesting how deceptive games like this or Little King’s Story can look simple and innocent, but is brutal games that can make some adults cry.