Today's game is a game I've been meaning to get to for YEARS. This is Mole Mania, a kinda obscure Gameboy game from 1996. It might be more fitting to call it a cult classic, cause those who've PLAYED this game claim it's one of the best Gameboy games ever. And it's got a Vibe to it, an absolutely amazing charming as fuck vibe. I don't remember WHY I heard about it, but I think I hear about it from a friend who speedran it. But it has a very nostalgic energy, I FEEL like I played this in 1996, like I rented it from a Blockbuster for a weekend, and even though I don't remember it, it left a deep mark inside me. Obviously I don't know if that happened, I don't THINK it did.
Anyways I finally got to it, and yeah! It's really good! This game came to us as a joint venture between Nintendo's R&D Team 1 and Pax Softnica. R&D 1 is Miyamoto's team, and Pax Softnica did a whole bunch of stuff, mostly helping other teams like on Earthbound, but alone they made the absolutely wonderful Hamtaro Gameboy games. I'll have to do those sometime.
You play as Muddy Mole, a Mole who returns home one day to find that his family of 7 children and his wife have been kidnapped by the evil Farmer Jinbe! Now you must puzzle your way through 7 different worlds and fight his minions to free your family! The game is kind of like Baby's First Sokoban. You move through each room, and the goal is to take the Black Orb that spawns in each room, and push/throw it into the exit barrier. Simple as that! But there are holes and objects in the way. You can push, pull, and throw the orbs, and other objects. Occasionally they throw in additional mechanics. You got barrels that can fill holes, elbow pipes that change throwing direction, weights that can be pushed but not pulled. It all makes for a game that feels easy and quickly grows into genuinely impressive puzzles. As a kid, I don't think I'd be able to beat this, but as an adult, I felt like a brain genius at times. It's not Void Stranger, but it's some DAMN good Sokoban.
Each level has a few goals, on top of just get to the end. There are 20 cabbages in each level. Put them in a hole to collect them, collect 5 and you get some health. There's a few items to collect, like a map and an item that lets you skip a puzzle. There's a bonus game, that's actually the VS mode in disguise, where Jinbe runs around and brains you with a hoe as you try and push cabbage into a hole. I kinda hate it so I'm glad I wouldn't have had any friends to play this with.
Then at the end of each level is a boss. The bosses are pretty cool. I had achievements to beat them without taking a hit, and it honestly wasn't too bad. You can just reload right before the boss if you fuck up, and they all have patterns you can learn. Except the final boss. The final level is a boss rush, with a checkpoint right in the middle, and the final boss is a spastic little freak with random pattern energy, and I had to beat those three bosses before him a LOT to get his no hit challenge. I got legit angry at a point, and was like "OKAY THIS GAME IS RUINED FOR ME", but the game IS still good. I just might have not done that sudden checkpoint bullshit lol
The aesthetics and music is also massively on point. I LOVE the main theme. This shit is gonna be in my head for the rest of my life. Anyways, the game didn't really do amazingly, as far as I can see, but it kinda has For The Frog The Bell Tolls energy. That is, a game that a lot of people don't know about, but it's a favorite of people who make games lol. Mole Mania may not have caught on and we didn't get a Mole Mania 64, but it's absolutely worth going back to look at today. Glad I finally got to it.