Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
January's been a rough month. I've died a couple dozen times. I've choked on plastic bags, washed up on the shore, had my stomach all clogged up with squid, and stopped breathing while careening wildly towards a scary-looking sea turtle.
I've been playing Survive! Mola mola!, a free game available on iOS and Android from Select Button Inc. It's become a surprise sensation, and from what I've played I'd say their success is well deserved. Why? Well, it all comes down to Death.
Mola mola is simple and familiar right from the start: Tap the food to feed your baby mola/sunfish to help it grow and go on risky adventures to help it grow even more. In that way it's already exactly what I want from a mobile game. I can pop in for a few minutes here and there throughout the day, tap tap tap, and then carry on with my life.
So you tap tap tap, aging your fish, upgrading its environment, flourishing in general... And then inevitably die. Die a lot. There are so many common and ridiculous ways for a sunfish to meet their end that it's a wonder they aren't already extinct. And strangely enough, that unforgiving mortal cycle is the hook. The art, the text, the wailing little ascii emoticons all contribute to making a newly-discovered death pattern an exciting event.
It's easy to have a love-hate relationships with games that outright rely on player death. Death in games has historically been (and continues to be) the ultimate failure. You messed up, you died, you lose. We're trained to take death in games a bit too personally because of this, even when the actual penalties are minimal, which is why roguelikes are still a bit of a hard sell for many game enthusiasts. But death in Mola mola is rewarded to the point that it's absolutely crucial to advancing the game. Death gives you upgrade points, with a bonus amount when you die from a new cause. Death also reduces your chances of dying in the same way again, so something that had a 75% chance of survival will leap to 95%. You also receive a growth bonus, making it easier to catch up to wherever you were in the sunfish lifecycle when you met your unfortunate end at the hands of... A shrimp shell. All theae little perks and adjustments mean that death doesn't grind you down -- it speeds you up.
My one complaint about Survive! Mola mola! has to be the ads. It is a free-to-play game with in-app purchases and an ad-supported revenue model, and these are things I don't begrudge any mobile game at this point. But Mola mola's ads are just a bit invasive. There are banners at the bottom of the screen at all times, and I can live with that. There are commercials that you can opt-in to watching in exchange for points and currencies, and that's a legitimately nice option. There are other commercials that appear too, but most of them can be skipped and I appreciate that. Then there are the pop-up ads that seem to like to appear most right when I'm tap tap tapping for all that food, ensuring that I tap tap tap my way to a Clash of Clans app page or something similar whether I intended to or not. Those are the ones that get under my skin, even though I'm normally a pretty big apologist for advertising in free games. There's no such thing as a free lunch and people deserve to be paid for their work, but I'd rather pay a flat fee up front than be regularly tricked into tapping something I have no real interest in.
Pop-up annoyances aside, Survive! Mola mola is a ridiculous, entertaining, and maybe even educational distraction for your phone or tablet. Grab it for iOS or Android and see for yourself.
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