The Mine (PC)
Placing a video game in a historical setting can immediately make the imagination run wild with the potential for what might be featured, but the extremely specific setting of the point-and-click adventure game The Mine intrigues because it is such an unexpectedly precise choice. The Mine is set in a 17 century Swedish copper mine, and thankfully it does get a bit of mileage out of that choice of setting, although at the same time it might not dig as deep into it as one would hope if they pick up the game curious about the concept.
The Mine stars a miner you will eventually get the chance to name, the young man having to take up work in a copper mine after his family farm was set ablaze under mysterious circumstances. While he wishes to know more about what happened, especially since his mother perished in the blaze, he still has to eat so he has to work, but his employment at the Swedish copper mine might get him closer to answers than he’d ever realize. What starts as a regular day of work becomes more complicated as you discover a few clues related to your past, but oddly enough, right as a present day central conflict is presented that could get this adventure game’s plot moving, you instead are greeted with some large words saying “TO BE CONTINUED” that immediately pull the wind out of the sails in terms of player investment. The plot barely had time to even hint at the direction it was heading before it wrapped up, this one to two hour game feeling more like the first episode of a television show than a complete game.
Before you hit that underwhelming and abrupt ending though you can at least say the game makes decent use of its setting. Set in the mining torn of Elsborg which is positioned near the real world copper mine found in Falun, Sweden, the game doesn’t see you venturing far from it, spending time mostly bumbling about town and the mine’s edge as you need to get ready for another day of work and need help from the locals thanks to you missing your torch. Interacting with the people of Elsborg is actually going to comprise most of the game’s puzzle elements, the player sometimes needing to find ways to ingratiate or irritate the right people that are usually not too complex but can still involve some nifty interactions. Since this is the first hour or two of a point-and-click game, gathering inventory items to use elsewhere and knowing what to say to people feels like a good introduction to the game’s systems and things aren’t too basic, but unfortunately they don’t progress beyond feeling like starter puzzles despite some interesting choices made in what activities you’ll be involved with during this short adventure.
One of the most interesting components of this game’s puzzle design is that you don’t necessarily need to solve every problem you find. Your path to The Mine isn’t exactly set in stone, the player able to follow a few different routes to get to work. The Mine does offer a hint system, your miner character noting things to himself when you click on a symbol in the top left, but there’s a bit of wiggle room in figuring out the way onward since there are multiple options on how to progress. The game world is rather small though so these won’t be wildly different and it’s likely you’ll have the other possible routes left hanging incomplete because you weren’t aware they didn’t connect to the path you ended up on, but it does add a little substance to an otherwise short game. The same can be said of a few special interactions. While most of the time it’ll be talking or moving the right items around town that makes some progress, other times you’ll settle down to do some actual work such as sharpening pickax heads with a grindstone, this taking the form of a small interactive section where you need to move the blades back and forth on the spinning stone with a rhythm you need to figure out on your own to complete the task. These are perhaps better thought of as immersive than entertaining, the work requiring some attention and you can mess up or even get a reward for doing particularly well at it but it still feels rather mundane.
When it comes to immersion though, one part of the game that stands above all others is when you actually enter that mine. There are a fair few activities to be done down there so it’s not all town activities, but when you first enter, the setting comes crushing down on you with some of its harsher realities. At times you can hear the miners talking rather plainly about the low life expectancy or other woes of the job, but actually entering their workplace and walking through it nails in how rough the life is. With a pick in one hand and the torch barely illuminating a bit of the tunnels before you, your hunched over miner shuffles forth through long empty shafts to his work. There’s a mini-map to keep you from losing your bearings, an especially important bit of aid once some puzzles necessitate moving about the tunnels more, but that first slow walk into the dark quite effectively establishes how dreary and taxing a life must be for a miner meant to work with such rudimentary tools in such a cramped space. Oddly enough though, The Mine elects not to have actually pickax mining be one of its interactive work tasks when that could have furthered the portrayed toil of our unfortunate leading man.
One reason The Mine ended up on my radar was because a personal friend voiced a minor character named Bror, but while he does a fine job for his small role, the voice acting in general here is rather rough. The strong Scandinavian accents can be said to be setting appropriate, but there are definitely some stilted line reads and some voice actors struggle to add the right emotion to lines when they aren’t outright making small errors in pronunciation. The general voice quality makes a character like Lars stand out even more, his voice actor putting a lot more heart into his performance and having no real accent either. Generally The Mine does look like the amateur project it is, its visuals reminiscent of an early 2000s PC game but besides some moments where your character momentarily struggles with walking where you want him to be, the relationship between visuals and play is sound so you’re able to spot interactable objects well enough without any pixel hunts. A bit of an odd choice was made when it came to text boxes though, character dialogue displaying next to a crude sketch of the character that only sometimes feels like it was meant to look comedic. That could almost be an endearing quirk of its presentation, but when everything is recontextualized in light of the incomplete story, you’re not really left with something to counterbalance the rough construction.
THE VERDICT: The Mine would work as the start of a larger adventure game, its puzzles sound if simple and the alternate problem solving paths an interesting approach to designing progression, but unfortunately the game ends before it really had a chance to get going. Seeing “TO BE CONTINUED” almost right as a larger plot is starting sucks the energy out of an experience that already didn’t have much going for it. A moody introduction to the mine itself is a standout moment to be sure, but puttering around town doing small interactions isn’t compelling enough to make up the entirety of this small point and click adventure.
And so, I give The Mine for PC…
A BAD rating. Most of The Mine was produced by a one man team, and I can understand the urge to release the game in the state it is. It’s easy to get excited about what you’re working on and want to see people react to it, or perhaps there’s a financial necessity at play leading to this game releasing before it’s ready. Technical problems in The Mine are thankfully not much to worry about, but instead, we have a game that is incomplete in a more traditional sense. It’s not a story that works in such a small portion, the player only given large questions and hardly enough clues to start connecting them meaningfully before you are told there’s currently no more story left to tell. The developer at least seems to have hopes for a sequel. The Mine is all concept without much follow-through though, ending more where you’d expect a demo to conclude. The sense for puzzle design at least seems decent enough, the game on the right track in that regard, but they don’t pack that level of depth that makes solving them overly satisfying. It may sound repetitive, but the problem here is very much that an appetizer was served in lieu of a main course, no disclaimer or hint of an incomplete story presented until it slams you in the face.
If this game was instead The Mine: Episode 1, it might not really turn heads but at least it’s design choices would make some sense. At the same time, selling an episodic game seems to go poorly even for major studios now, so unfortunately the truth is that The Mine would have been better off just not releasing until much more work had been put into it. The Mine only scratches the surface of what its puzzle design and historical setting could lead to and such offerings are not enough to offset the sting of an inconclusive experience.