Survive! Mola Mola!
I have killed seventy-eight mola molas.
My seventy-ninth mola mola is classified as a “Living Legend.” Enjoying a comfortable life in an aquarium, he has the look of an old man : wrinkled eyes, a beard, and a battle scar beneath his fin. Like all seventy-eight molas before him, he’s been through a hell of a lot in his life: parasites, the spear-like beaks of birds, and adventures to the cold depths of the sea.
And like all those before him, he is going to die.
Survive! Mola Mola! is a mobile game somewhere between Insane Aquarium and a Tamagotchi, or maybe a Neopet. You’re not really responsible for your mola’s health beyond feeding him, and you can accomplish this simply by tapping on the various foods that appears on the screen. Secondly, you can send him — encourage him? — to go on dangerous adventures.
Any of these things, literally any of them, can kill your mola mola.
At first, I was annoyed with the game. The basic loop is simple: you spend your virtual currency (“MP,” which I will only accept to be short for “mola points,” don’t give me any of that “mana” crap) on upgrades to your mola: different food, different adventures, or higher food count. With them, you get him to grow bigger. You can earn MP by playing the game or with cash. I get it, I said, it’s an endless loop you can shortcut with real life dollar bills. I was playing Disco Zoo at the time, which felt comparable — you can click on more animals if you pay more money!
Like most pet simulation games, it’s easy to become attached to your mola mola. I mean, the first stage of every mola mola’s life is “Sugar Ball” — just look at this thing:
Growing big is slow at first. Each piece of food is agonizingly anticipated, each successful adventure comes with a deep sigh of relief, with each evolution you shed a tear. Each death is very, very sad. These are the typical gut responses of almost any pet-raising, “nurture”-focused game. More than once, I thought back to coming home from elementary school, tugging an egg-shaped device from my mom’s purse, and gazing in agony at the screen, where a pixel creature lay dead in its own pixel feces.
Survive! Mola Mola! has a very different charm.
Somewhere around my twentieth mola mola, I held my breath as my fish grew past the stage of “Non-Celebrity.” The screen flashed, and my mola became a “Mola King,” complete with a bright red crown on his head. That’s right: my fish had physically evolved a crown onto his head. He’d also developed some hubris: “Everybody says being a mola mola is like living the life of a fish on hard mode,” says description of the Mola King. “Hahaha, it doesn’t care about those opinions anymore though.”
Was my fish becoming… arrogant?
The game is full of these sorts of things: little bits of a story that bubble up with every evolution, every adventure — and every death. Part of the game’s charm is in the poor translation on some of these (and maybe this is deliberate, I can’t tell — “this is heaven,” reads one adventure, “I swim good feeling”), and even more of it is in the fish’s hilarious, anime-inspired facial expressions. More so than the game’s mechanics, I was drawn in by wanting to unfold the weird series of events that defined each mola’s life. My Mola King had attitude.
And, uh, so did the next Mola King, and the one after that.
So it goes?
Things became a bit more complicated when I figured out that dying actually equated to meaningful progress in the game — by dying, you receive a certain amount of MP. This allows you to purchase more upgrades, and it becomes less likely that you’ll die in the same way next time. Simply put: your next mola will be be better than the last.
In a way, the game motivates you to murder your mola. You want him to crash into a rock, you want him to choke to death on the next piece of food you can afford to buy him. Each fish becomes potential mola point fodder.
I have killed seventy-eight mola molas.
Some of them I mourned, some of them I sent gleefully to their deaths on purpose to farm MP (although the ending for doing this is “natural causes”— like the game knows what I’m doing, and wants me to feel better).
My seventy-ninth mola, my Living Legend, is one of these sacrifices.
His time has nearly come. Sudden Death approaches. At this point, I’ve unlocked nearly everything in the game, and I’m not sure what keeps me going.
Maybe it’s a sense of apology. Maybe it’s so that every one of those mola molas died for a reason: so that the next one — this LAST one? — will grow larger than life.
I don’t know.
My Living Legend mola mola sinks low to the bottom of the screen, eyes shut. I want to say, very dramatically, that Survive! Mola Mola! is a game about death, but more than likely, it’s a game about how life goes on. There will always be another fish, just as wide-eyed and eager as the last. Another “sugar ball,” another “Living Legend,” another battle-hardened “Voyager” setting out into the vastness of the ocean.
There’s something rather hopeful about that, I suppose.
You can download Survive! Mola Mola! on the iOS app store here.
