It would have been so easy for Yacht Club Games to rest on their laurels with their first major post-Shovel Knight project. In the same way that Shovel Knight was a loving homage to and pastiche of various beloved sidescrolling NES games but through the lens of game design in the 2010s, the elevator pitch for Mina the Hollower is, essentially, a modern take on the various Game Boy and Game Boy Color The Legend of Zelda entries, but with a bit of Castlevania and even some Bloodborne imagery and tone, plus a digging mechanic (Mina is a mouse, after all) to boot. As someone that loves all of those things, it seemed like a matter of course that I would at the very least like Mina, but I also find indie games that are simply angling to be spiritual successors to beloved works rarely reach the highs of their inspirations and are often even let down by them. It’s a good thing, then, that Mina the Hollower is so much more than the works that inspired it.
Yes, if you’ve ever played an overhead Zelda game, you will absolutely be at home here, at least in the early portions of the game. Playing as Mina, you start on a ship making your way to Tenebrous Isle to repair the Spark Generators you built in the past that each power their respective region and find out why they’re failing. Your ship is quickly attacked by a kraken; you choose one of three weapons at the start (a whip, hammer, or knives), and then the video game happens. Making your way to the central city of Ossex feels mostly familiar, the first area acting as a tutorial for not only combat but also jumping, burrowing underground, healing, and leveling up.
There are, of course, some wrinkles thrown in, such as checkpoints in the form of hideaways that act similarly to bonfires from Dark Souls, as well as a healing mechanic not dissimilar to the estus flask from that series as well, but it’s not until you’re through this opening portion that the game starts to reveal itself—what starts off feeling like a straightforward love letter to Game Boy games quickly becomes one of the most thoughtful reevaluations of a well-worn genre that I’ve ever experienced.
Once you’re let off the reins, you’re truly free to do basically whatever you want in Mina the Hollower. While the game does lightly suggest an order in which to complete the main story (by way of its extremely clever and cute newspapers that get published after every Spark Generator is relit), with the exception of one area, you’re free to go anywhere in the game from the moment the first boss is defeated. While it might sound simple, for a game designed to look and feel in all ways like a Game Boy Color game to give you that degree of freedom feels like an astonishing design feat.
Player expression seems to be the design ethos at the heart of Mina the Hollower, because it extends far beyond being able to explore the game in any order you choose. The core combat is an obvious example—three of the five weapons are available from the start, with the other two purchasable from the blacksmith in Ossex, and each manages to feel completely unique from the others, despite the simplistic nature of the combat and purposefully limited number of buttons the developers take advantage of in order to facilitate their illusion of this being a Game Boy game. Trust me, you absolutely cannot play the hammer, with its emphasis on charging up powerful attacks and dodge rolling, the same way you play the battery buster, a quick and short-range cudgel whose melee strikes charge up electricity to be used as ammunition by switching to a gun form with a button press.
All five weapons also have multiple optional upgrades you can find in the world, each of which adds further utility. The knives, for instance, get upgraded with a dash attack that also works in the air, which elevated them from by far my least used weapon to a staunch favorite, especially for platforming sections where the air dash could get me just over a pit that I’d have otherwise fallen into.
Where the rubber really hits the road when it comes to player expression, however, is the trinket system. There are dozens upon dozens of trinkets scattered throughout the world, and nearly all of them can have a significant effect on how you approach playing Mina the Hollower on a molecular level. Sure, there are some basic ones that merely upgrade stats like attack or defense by a point, but who wants to bother with that when you can create a build that leaves a damaging acid trail behind you as you burrow and can trigger an explosion every time you pop out of the ground?
The freedom you have to approach any given situation in whatever way you see fit even alleviates what could amount to frustration, at least for me. This is a genuinely hard game, regularly offering up challenges (both platforming and combat) that are by orders of magnitude beyond anything I can remember from Shovel Knight or any of its expansions. Mina the Hollower does offer extensive, extensive modifiers to be able to engage with the game in basically whatever way you see fit, be it making the game easier, harder, or just plain goofier.
And while this is a truly fantastic feature that I’m excited to dig into more outside of a review context, they’re not even what I’m referring to when I talk about alleviating potential frustration. Yes, while I could have simply turned on a lower damage toggle (or even an invincibility one for myself!) during any of the bosses that took me more than a handful of attempts, it was so much more fun to try a different weapon better suited to the fight or even completely swap my trinkets around. On a particular boss where I was having trouble even finding the correct moments to heal, I equipped a set of trinkets that not only made those sips of my spark vials much faster but also gave me more uses of them…and launched homing missiles each time I healed. I’m not sure I’ve ever come up with an idea for a build in a video game that was so versatile and silly at the same time, and that’s with me still missing a couple dozen trinkets.
The final wrinkle on combat comes in the form of sidearms. Think of these as similar to subweapons in Castlevania; you’ll encounter them largely by destroying candlesticks in the environment, and you spend joules to deploy them, each with a different cost. Sidearms are just as varied and wild as the trinkets, ranging from something as simple as an axe you toss in an overhead arc to a full-on motorcycle (complete with its own racing challenges) or my personal favorite, the Recall Disc, which is deployed on the ground until you press the sidearm button a second time to immediately warp to it from anywhere on screen and let off an explosion to boot.
Personally, I never really built my Mina around sidearms in the same way I did other types of damage, for no real reason other than there’s just so much stuff to see and do in the game that this aspect just fell by the wayside a bit for me. But they’re just as viable as any other approach you can come up with for combat.
I would be remiss to spend this entire review breathlessly enchanted about the player expression and wide variety of tools, though, when Mina’s level design and platforming are so stellar. Each region of the game has its own distinct types of puzzles and platforming, mostly facilitated through generally area-specific objects and set pieces, as well as the different types of terrain you’ll end up burrowing through and how they affect Mina’s movement and jumping capabilities; normal dirt behaves differently than water, which behaves differently than ice, and so on. It never feels like you’re doing the same thing in Mina the Hollower for longer than it takes to complete the current screen you’re currently on.
This otherwise infallible pacing and forward momentum were hampered for me a bit in two ways, though neither is close to dealbreakers. At times, when you’re having to deal with platforming challenges, environmental hazards, and enemies all at once, the game can be a tad overstimulating and hard to separate out what you should be focusing on. This also applies to some boss fights, where a boss that’s more than half the size of the screen is trying to bump into you while the environment is erupting in explosions and fireballs are raining from the sky. This, of course, can be mitigated with the aforementioned builds and modifiers if need be or just by sitting down to learn the boss, but it felt less like skill issues on my part and more just an occasional screen-filling overwhelmedness. But maybe I’m just getting old.
Secondly, without getting too into it for the sake of spoilers, to progress near the end of the game I had to do a lot of backtracking to rediscover specific screens, which proved somewhat problematic with no map in the game besides the optional world overview. If you’re smarter, more curious, or just plain luckier than I am, maybe this won’t even be an issue for you, but as a general tip: you can figure out what’s going on with the mirrors in the game much sooner than I realized. At the very least, maybe take some notes on where to find them again.
Oh, and despite how often the word “Game Boy” cropped up in this review, I never mentioned just how on point the entire aesthetic is here. Mina the Hollower looks and sounds like how Game Boy games look and sound in your memories, and the spritework on the bosses and bigger set pieces in particular is truly impressive. The soundtrack, then, is just as excellent as you’d expect from lead composer Jake Kaufman; I personally think it’s his best work yet, with special shoutouts to the music that plays in Nox’s Bayou, the Hollower’s Guild, and the extremely Mega Man 5-sounding Astral Orrery.
Originally, I wanted to open this closing section with a classic “Let me tell you about the moment when I knew I loved Mina the Hollower” mic drop, followed by describing a really damn cool thing that happened to me over the course of my 20-hour first playthrough. The problem is that moments like these are around every corner, and I mean that quite literally; I’ve never played a game that felt more dense with meaningful secrets, rewards, and surprises than Mina the Hollower, despite the fact that my completion percentage is sitting at a paltry 63%.
I could tell you about having to get a composer frog named Cliff back to his band by carrying him across a harrowing series of pits and navigating around enemies in a bayou. Or carefully platforming around giant rotating gears and black holes, only to have a floating cube rush me down and transport me into a digital prison I had to escape from. Or when a boss fight erupted in the music hall I had snuck into, with one of the silliest and most creative gimmicks I’d seen in a while.
This is a fraction of a fraction of the amount of times I was surprised and delighted by Mina the Hollower, and I can only imagine, with genuine excitement, what other cool stuff I’ve managed to miss out on. And that’s without touching on the extensive New Game+ system here, as well as the new modifiers that unlock after beating the game. Hell, I just want to play a fresh file of the game simply to progress in a completely different order and try and get more acclimated to using the whip. Here’s to that remaining 37%.
