The mola mola, also known as the ocean sunfish, is quite an animal. The largest bony fish in the sea, it can grow up to 1,000 kg on average, and females lay 300 million eggs each time they spawn.
It might seem an unlikely subject for an indie game, but Survive! Mola Mola!, a simulation game with cookie clicker elements, has been steadily climbing up Asia’s App Stores the past few days. If you’ve been seeing screenshots of a mobile phone game featuring a dead sunfish, that’s it. The Japanese edition of the game reportedly has four million downloads, with the English version of Mola Mola!, released late September 2014, now ranking in the top 25 of South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan’s highest grossing App Store games.
Developed by a small 3-man team called Select Button in Japan, Survive! Mola Mola! puts players in charge of growing the last baby sunfish of a 300 million egg spawn. The mola mola has to eat fish, squid, prawns, and more in order to grow to its maximum size. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Mola mola are very fragile creatures, as the game will teach your when your mola mola dies suddenly. Practically anything can kill the absurd creature, ranging from it crashing down too suddenly into the ocean to it choking on a prawn, sardine bone, or jellyfish-that-turned-out-to-be-a-plastic-bag. As you may have guessed, there are tons of ways to die in this game, and you earn achievements doing them, too.
To keep users incentivized beyond simply earning achievements, you are given game currency whenever you die, with the amount earned decided by how you die, and at what stage in life your mola mola gives up the ghost at. Game currency, known as manbo points, is used to purchase new and more effective food sources, new adventures that give a bonus to growth – if you don’t die from them – and more food appearing on screen. Manbo points are the only thing in the game that can be bought via in-app purchase.
The charm of Survive! Mola Mola! is that you never know when your mola mola will die, yet the increased growth rate of your next mola mola experiences will soon you have hoping the this one will keel over fast. The temptation to spring for just a few more manbo points will always be there, as will the secret hope that your mola mola will soon grow to rule the ocean.
Survive! Mola Mola! is available on both Android and iOS.
See: What the hell is Pirate Kings and why are you inviting me to play?
Editing by C. Custer, mola mola photo by Flickr user Oliver Dodd
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