After a period of uncertainty when the game saw last-minute delays, Mina the Hollower successfully went gold and hit the market. The second IP from the makers of Shovel Knight continues the style established by Yacht Club Games and creates a retro gaming experience through and through. Mina the Hollower can be best described as a chimera of a game. It takes a foundation from The Legend of Zelda’s 2D titles, the gothic and melancholic art style from Castlevania, the overall progression and combat philosophy of a Souls game, a gameplay loop straight out of a metroidvania, and everything else expected from a retro title.
Mina the Hollower Excels in Every Design Decision
Normally, games that try to mix too much end up without an identity. However, despite the aforementioned description of Mina the Hollower as a chimera, the game is actually astonishingly well put together. It never introduces a new mechanic on top of Mina’s initial kit, yet it somehow never gets stale. Knowledge is key to half of the adventure, and there are a lot of tricks and mechanics you can only discover through trial-and-error or careful attention to details.
One of the most notable “retro” decisions of the game was doing away with any form of tutorial and orientation HUD. This is a choice that puts extra strain on level design and diegetic clues, since there’s no other safety net to prevent players from feeling lost or frustrated. Despite the risky bet, Yacht Club Games expertly crafted a world that feels overwhelming at first and intuitive by the end.
Early in my playthrough, I thought that certain mechanics or decisions weren’t properly executed. In my mind, I was comparing a lot of it to Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo since both use a 3/4 isometric view. The longer I played Mina, the more I realized how my preconceptions were unfounded. To put it simply, Pipistrello uses the universal visual language of video games and is therefore easily understood. Mina the Hollower introduces a new dialect and expects you to pick it up through contextual clues.
One simple example of this effect was in understanding how the game conveyed concepts like elevation. Some obstacles allow you to jump freely over them; others indicate a clear, impassable barrier. Ledges that only allow you to drop out of them are highlighted with small arrows. Most importantly, several secrets are hiding in plain sight until you start to notice these clues.
Satisfying Combat and Interesting Ideas
One of the easiest ways to understand a game’s combat is through its healing system, and Mina has mixed plenty of common restrictions together. You have limited vials to drink that reset every checkpoint, and there’s a temporary health bar. The key here is that those aren’t different ways to heal; they’re reliant on one another. Hitting enemies fills the empty section of your life bar, and the vials will only heal up to that point. You need to both keep the aggression up and find an opening to heal.
This results in a combat system that expects good positioning and predictive decisions from you, sometimes more than most soulslikes. Every action matters, and you’ll need to keep a cool head to avoid scramble situations. This is also enforced by the defensive systems of the game, since they work under similar principles. There’s no traditional dodge button; the game instead expects you to use Mina’s core ability of burrowing. The catch is that you can only burrow after you have done a full jumping arc. You have plenty of invulnerable frames to avoid any incoming damage, but you’ll need to react as soon as possible when an attack is coming your way.
As for your offensive choices, the game only contains 5 weapons, but each has a unique flair and flow. To start with, you get to choose between the usual 3 options: the daggers (fast and weak), the hammer (slow and powerful), and the whip (a safe, balanced option). The game offers two more weapons that you can get as soon as you can reach the city’s blacksmith or through red chests scattered across the isle.
Even though I spent 90% of my playtime with the hammer, I tried every weapon eventually. Having only 5 weapons might sound like there’s not enough variety, but Mina made each and every one of them have a unique feel. These choices allow for more playstyles than many other games, boasting hundreds of weapons. You’ll need to look for different cues and combat flow to maintain a good damage output while not putting yourself at risk. Weapons can also be upgraded, and they are never powercrept; you will always need to be using their base kit on top of any new moves.
Platforming and Exploration Aren’t Afterthoughts
A rather common trap some games fall into is having sections with secondary systems that don’t feel as fleshed out. A good example of this is Doom Eternal, whose platforming sections were constantly criticized by the community. While Mina may have put quite a hefty amount of work into ensuring the combat feels just right, other aspects of the game haven’t suffered for it. In fact, plenty of the considerations you have for battle will also apply to platforming.
Mistakes in pure platformers are punished in a “three strikes” fashion. Every time you bump into something you shouldn’t have or fall after missing a jump, you lose one point. For games that have health bars, you can usually bypass these restrictions either through damage reduction or by having enough healing items. However, due to how Plasma works, you can maintain the traditional system of platforming rather than brute force through excessive health pools.
Here, when you fail a platforming section, you are penalized in such a way that vials cannot immediately help you. After enough failed attempts, you will need to backtrack or press on with no more mistakes. Backtracking and finding enemies is one way to bring your health to full, but you will carry the negative penalty you accumulated, and you must get everything right in combat. Alternatively, backtracking may not always be feasible, so you need to rely on flower drops in between gauntlets.
Sometimes enemies will be present along with tricky jumping sections, and your weapon of choice will suddenly matter a whole lot when jumping around. You only have a good range with the hammer if you charge your attack, which means priming an attack midway through a jump. Daggers have good mobility options that can help in navigating bottomless pits, but you also need to be careful because they incur a heavy recoil when hitting anything. These are systems that often feed into each other.
Sequence Breaks Don’t Exist in Mina Because There Is No Sequence in the First Place
Putting all of this together, you have an experience with absolute freedom in how to approach it. No upgrades are required to access any given area, so your routing depends solely on your comprehension of the game’s mechanics. Sidearms are one core component of the game that I haven’t mentioned yet, but I also can’t discuss them in detail without outright giving the solution to certain situations. You’ll need to think outside and inside the box when playing Mina the Hollower.
It’s a game that demands your attention but consistently rewards you for it as well. Mina the Hollower is one of those cases where the first playthrough has a certain magic that fades on subsequent replays. It makes full use of the “a-ha” moments of discovery that are unique to the medium.
While Mina may not reach the heights of games like Tunic or Blue Prince in that regard, this is where modifiers show their potential. Inspired by community efforts like Project Ura and randomizer runs for Zelda games, Mina was built from the ground up to accommodate these options. Items can be shuffled around; you can have one-hit-kill turned on for Mina and enemies alike; you can build a “Dante Must Die” difficulty to truly put your skills to the test; visuals can be mirrored and tweaked so that they look ever so slightly different, and so on.
Of course, those are only recommended after a “default” run of Mina the Hollower. It won’t even offer options for “easy”, “normal”, or “hard”; you’re just thrust into the fray as soon as you start a new save. The balancing for the game without any modifiers feels like the best first impression this game can make. It’ll put enough of a resistance so that you can’t slack off, but it will never be so unreasonable that it becomes a point of contention within the fanbase (such as Bilewater in Hollow Knight Silksong).
It’s a very delicate equilibrium to achieve, and I believe it’s one of Yacht Club Games’ most impressive achievements. The game’s systems work in sync to ensure you’ll always have a path to victory, but never by cheesing it. Skilled players can make daring decisions, and they’ll progress through the game at a brisk pace. Meanwhile, you can also choose to slow down and practice certain techniques or just revisit certain locations and explore for something that will give you an edge. The game gives you the choice of how much risk you’re willing to take and adjusts the reward to match.
About Assists and Accessibility
There is one subject where the game doesn’t ensure every player can have a good time. Prior to its release, one of the touted features was “having the biggest assist mode ever.” A lot of discussion was generated on social media about it (as they are wont to do), and even more misconceptions about what it does and what it does not do. The importance, feasibility, and possible implications of accessibility features are subjects that deserve an extensive discussion. However, as to not labor the point, I’ll stick to how it relates to just Mina the Hollower.
Even though I am far from an expert in this field, since some of my friends need said features, I have learned to look out for a few accessibility issues. The two main problems I’ve seen are the lack of colorblindness options and alternate types and sizes for fonts. In other words, the choices for 8-bit fonts and a limited color palette were perfect for the artistic feel of the game. However, people with dyslexia, protanopia (red colorblindness), and deuteranopia (green colorblindness) might have a hard time parsing what’s on the screen.
In fact, few actual accessibility options exist within the modifiers menu, and only one of them doesn’t disable feats/achievements. You could tweak some of the visual settings as a palliative, but the fact remains that the game fails at accounting for certain disabilities. There’s even one badge (an item that needs to be equipped) that reduces the number of button presses for certain actions, something that many games would classify as an accessibility feature. What Mina has is more accurately described as modifiers or cheats rather than assists or accessibility.
All Killer, (Almost) No Filler
In a drier tone, Mina the Hollower offers excellent value for its proposition. The game lasts from 20 to 30 hours with room for many more hours of custom tweaks. Increased challenge, speedrunning, no-hit runs, randomizers, or just a comfy title to revisit from time to time. There’s almost nothing to complain about in this title.
As I finished the game, my list of notes had only three entries that could be considered downsides: poor accessibility, bad rebinding options, and a predictable story. I’ve already discussed the lack of visual aids, so I won’t rehash it here. The bindings problem is that the game will always consider the “Jump” button as confirm and the “Heal” button as return. You won’t have issues if you use the default options, but if you change anything in them, you might need to deal with awkward button combinations to navigate the menus.
It’s not anywhere close to a deal-breaker, but it is an outlier for a game that’s otherwise fairly well polished. I’ve encountered no bugs, no performance issues, and nothing that would classify as bad optimization. For a studio that worked on 15 different platforms, it’s weird that an oversight more commonly associated with amateur devs would be the only one that I ran into. Maybe it’s something that’ll be changed post-release, but keep in mind that it may be a game where you’ll need to use default bindings or counter-intuitive keys for menu navigation.
When it comes to story, that is the only part of the game where it doesn’t overdeliver. If you stop to read the first pages of the in-game manual, you can deduce almost the entire plot and how it’ll play out. Characters are one-dimensional, the setup is incredibly predictable, and there are no twists that will surprise you. Despite making the world feel so alive in gameplay, I couldn’t say the same happens to the narrative. This may not be a title that will please fans of story-driven games, but it’s noteworthy that the harshest critique I can make for the game is that the story is just average.
All in all, this is a game that was well worth the wait. I’m unsure if this is an experience that can convince people who don’t like retro games to give the genre a chance, but it’s definitely a must-play for those who do. Delivering on almost every promise with astounding quality, having an innovative take on an old genre, and just being overall extremely well put together, Mina the Hollower is a game with a lot to like and little to critique. It’s clearly targeted for a certain niche, and, save a couple of issues, it offers nothing less than excellence.
Disclaimer: Yacht Club Games provided a PC (Steam) copy of Mina the Hollower for review purposes.
