Mina The Hollower

Mina The Hollower was one of my most anticipated games of the year. I loved Shovel Knight and I especially loved Specter Of Torment, so to see Yacht Club Games go full gothic for their next big game was a cool prospect. The clear inspiration from Zelda, Castlevania, and soulslikes, all genres I love, also felt tailored specifically for me. And the reviews on Metacritic looked incredible, a 92?! It was the best-received game of the year! Better than Resident Evil, better than 007, better than Pokopia! I was all in on the Mina hype cycle, counting down the hours until its release, and woke up bright and early super excited to play it. So naturally, when I finally got my hands on it, I... liked it. But unfortunately, I didn't love it.

Mina The Hollower starts pretty strong. The prologue was a very tightly-designed tutorial with banging music, the borrowing mechanic was creative and felt great to use for platforming, the early boss fight against Thorne was a ton of fun, and the pixel art was charming and luscious throughout. Then the world opens up, and taking the time to explore the overworld and level up was easily my favorite part of the game. If there's one thing Mina consistently nails, it's the map design and the sense of exploration. Pretty much every screen was memorable making it easy to navigate even if I didn't have a map, and there were tons of cool collectibles hidden all over the place that felt intuitive and satisfying to collect. The first dungeon was also pretty solid, if a bit unremarkable, and the difficulty throughout felt tough but fair. I've seen a lot of reviews claim this early stretch was the hardest part of the game, but I thought it was all pretty reasonable if you take the time to explore.

But once I started to tackle the first three dungeons, the cracks started to show a bit. One potentially interesting mechanic was the sidearms which basically work like the secondary weapons in Castlevania in that you can swap them out. However, in Mina, many collectibles are straight-up hidden behind these temporary sidearms and if you happen to not have the right one at the right time, you gotta go backtrack for the one you need. As a result, I found myself not experimenting with the sidearms at all since I felt I needed one that let me jump across multiple spaces. There's a similar issue in terms of the keys. There are tons of locks hidden around, and more often than not you will not have enough keys to unlock everything which ends up leading to, you guessed it, even more backtracking. Where this issue really becomes apparent is when I realized that there aren't really any permanent ability unlocks like in most games of this vein. Outside of stuff like stat increases, Mina at the start of the game is basically the same as Mina at the end of the game. So you end up not getting that satisfying sense of progression that you usually would in a Zeldalike, but you still have all the backtracking.

It was also around this point that the enemy and boss design was really starting to bug me. Mina's movement kit is fairly limited. You can only attack in four directions, your weapons all have very thin hitboxes, and your only dodge move is the burrow which has more of a starting delay than your average dodge. So naturally, most of the enemies have really erratic eight-directional movement that can feel frustrating to learn, and don't even get me started on the flying enemies. I ended up bruteforcing a lot of the combat encounters in this game with a tank build because I always had enough health refills for it, which made Mina's combat just feel unsatisfying. Compared to something like Silksong or Nine Sols which gave you so many options to counter your aggressive opponents, I felt like I was constantly on the back-foot and getting randomly clipped by an enemy in Mina. And this only got worse with the boss fights which are often these huge monsters with confusing hitboxes, especially if you try to stand behind them. The weird part is that I didn't really end up dying much in Mina compared to other soulslikes I've played, but that's less because of the game design and more because of how many safety nets you have. I'd rather have a game like Silksong or Metroid Dread where it's super easy to die but everything feels tight and deliberate, to a game as messy as Mina.

While I was still enjoying the exploration and the platforming, the combat just kept getting in the way, and I wasn't really as invested in the setting and story to make up for that. The main premise felt very predictable, you could see the main twist coming from a mile away, and a lot of the music in the first half was more atmospheric and ponderous compared to the consistent bangers we had in Shovel Knight. And all of this came to a head in the third dungeon, Septemburg, which was so bad that I nearly gave up on the game altogether. The concept was cool. It's a Halloween town with giant lawnmowers, pumpkins all over the place, and a creepy serial killer occasionally chasing after you. However, there's also wind mechanics and lightning strikes that home in on you unless you're near a lightning rod (something that I felt was very poorly conveyed), and the enemy design is at its absolute worst here. So while the dungeon actually started off as pretty fun, by the end you're dealing with all this shit at the same time while being chased by the serial killer and it just felt way too overtuned. I was genuinely shocked that this was the game that was getting all those 92s, I wasn't having fun and felt completely checked-out.

But then, as I reluctantly started to head over to the fourth dungeon, I noticed something. The game was... getting good again? Every dungeon from Bone Beach onward was genuinely fun and creative with more engaging platforming than ever before and less frustrating enemy encounters. It also helped that I was able to scrounge up enough bones to buy some pretty great upgrades and equippable trinkets that mended a lot of my bigger issues with the game. I unlocked the ability to equip two sidearms, and I got a trinket that gave me a boost of speed every time I hit an enemy allowing me to play as aggressive as I wanted. The boss fights felt less repetitive and focused on contact damage, the story got a bit more engaging as it focused more on Mina's conflicted nature, and even the music got way more energetic and bumping, especially Yuzo Koshiro's tracks which I'd argue are the best in the game. The high point for me was the penultimate dungeon, the Astral Orrery, a gorgeous space-themed area with tons of inventive gimmicks, stellar music, and a fantastic three-phase boss fight to cap it all off. Not to say the final dungeon wasn't also a pretty great sendoff, it was Mina at its most unabashedly gothic and ended on a surprisingly gutsy and tragic final note that really stuck with me.

So then, where does that leave Mina The Hollower. I'm glad I did end up really enjoying it by the end, but that doesn't really change the fact that I just wasn't enjoying myself for much of the first half, and a lot of my issues with the early-game still hold true. The fact that there's a New Game Plus with a bunch of variations does help if I ever want to replay the game, but would I ever want to start up a new save and have to deal with those growing pains again? Maybe I'd know how to dodge those issues on a second playthrough, but does that make them not issues anymore? I don't know. All I can say is, I think Mina The Hollower is a great game with strong platforming and exploration, a stellar second half, and loads of charm and polish. But it's just not one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year, not with as many lows as it had. I wouldn't even say it was my favorite indie 2D Zeldalike starring a rodent with a whip, since I thought last year's Pipistrello & The Cursed Yoyo was a much better game in pretty much every respect. 

That being said, I'm glad it seems to be doing well as Yacht Club Games did really need the hit. It may not have lived up to Shovel Knight for me, but I'm glad these guys get to keep on making games.