Collection essentials #157: Mole Mania (Game Boy)

Shigeru Miyamoto is an absolute legend in the world of video games, creator of many of Nintendo’s most iconic games and series such as Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda. Seemingly everything he touches turns into an iconic long-running series. Except for Mole Mania, that is.

Mole Mania is what you’d call an action puzzle game, one where the primary objective of most levels is to use your brain to figure out how to progress through a level designed to require logical thinking to figure out a specific course of action to advance. The “action” part of it means that sometimes you’ll sometimes have to do something like avoid enemies or use precise timing as part of the experience, but generally speaking these games are primarily played with the thinking part of your brain rather than fast reflexes. 

The objective on Mole Mania’s levels is to find a way to drag a huge black wrecking ball to destroy the gate blocking your way forward. You play as, surprise, a mole named Muddy Mole who has the ability to burrow underground. Levels in this game have two layers. When you dig, the screen will swap to the underground layer of the stage. Often your path is blocked in one of the two layers, and you have to swap between being above and below ground at different times to get to where you need to be. And of course, there are plenty of elements that complicate the experience, such as enemies, barrels, ice and pipes.

While this game didn’t spawn a series and has largely lived in obscurity, it’s still very well-designed and lots of fun to play as you’d expect a Miyamoto creation to be. I’m not really sure why this game didn’t really amount to anything other than this one release like all of his other creations seem to do. Perhaps it’s because the characters themselves aren’t marketable or memorable enough. Maybe sales numbers didn’t live up to expectations. But Mole Mania is still definitely one of the best offerings on the original Game Boy and worth your time.