Mina the Hollower Review

Mina the hollower, yacht club games

It must be unbelievably daunting to have a breakout indie game to the extent that Yacht Club Games had with Shovel Knight. The retro inspired action platformer is still often cited as a modern classic and was inescapable upon its release in the summer of 2014. Since Shovel Knight, we have seen various indie developers come and go, breaking out with a hit and subsequently either falling off with a disappointing follow-up or coming back with something meeting the expectations of their debut game.

It’s with bearing the expectations of Shovel Knight in mind that I am delighted to say that despite arriving almost a decade later, Yacht Club Games has risen to the challenge and delivered an outstanding sophomore effort with Mina the Hollower.

Mace, Dagger, Hammer – Dig

The studio has been on record stating that if Shovel Knight is its Super Mario, Mina the Hollower is its Legend of Zelda. While this is an admirable premise on its own and certainly makes for some attractive headlines, it’s also underselling just how much of a genre-bender Mina the Hollower can feel like at times. While the player controls Mina through a top-down overworld, the construction of this world owes as much to A Link to the Past as it does FromSoftware’s seminal Bloodborne, with each area cleverly interlinking and winding back on itself, making traversal a joy.

The combat also leans on this too. Players start with the option for one of three weapons – the Nightstar, a long-range iron mace that functions similarly to a Belmont’s whip, the Blaststrike Maul, a giant hammer that can be charged to increase its force, and Whisper and Vesper, twin daggers that allow for quick successive attacks at short range.

My only frustrations with combat came from the game’s commitment to traditional four-directional movement. While this is fitting for its retro inspired design and doesn’t affect the combat, tension during combat often arises as a result of wrestling with the controls as much as it does learning enemy patterns and adapting. Some of my grievances are due to personal preference, others are due to general low quality of most modern controllers’ d-pads, either way it’s a point of friction that works both for and against the game.

I spent the majority of my playthrough wielding the Nightstar but managed to find all of the starter weapons alongside some extra ones as I progressed. Each weapon completely changes the flow of combat, with some prioritizing short or long-ranged attacks, and each offers multiple upgrades that can be found throughout the world to enhance their capabilities. Mina can also wield sidearms, a unique set of subweapons that are lost upon death featuring their own properties and often providing extra traversal options during platforming challenges.

Breaking from the mold even further, Mina manages to be a surprisingly capable platformer despite the usual trappings of its genre. Owing to her unique burrowing mechanic, Mina can gain extra elevation for overcoming pits and other obstacles. This opens up the levels even further, as environments adapt in different ways to accommodate her burrowing ability, which offers extra distance to her jump. For instance, in water Mina will drown if the player haphazardly lunges in directly, but burrowing instead allows for extra jump momentum to be gained, essentially functioning as a limited time swimming mechanic.

The best thing about the burrowing mechanic is how little it changes. Instead, the difficulty is molded around it, making for some intense and blood-pumping platforming sections in the latter half.

Of Mice and Monsters

Based on some online scuttle, it appears that Mina the Hollower’s difficulty will be a sticking point for some on either side of the spectrum. In my experience, I found that Yacht Club has struck an incredible balance between fair and frustrating. Bosses are expertly tuned so that their patterns can be recognized after only a few attempts, but still offer a challenge that feels rewarding to overcome, and multi-phase fights are carefully dished out that feel appropriate based on the intensity of their prior rounds.

If the difficulty is too much, things can be adjusted thanks to the ‘Modifier’ options. These can be enabled to make the game easier or more challenging to the player’s liking, however they come at the cost of achievements (or ‘Feats’, as they’re referred to in-game). The team has gone all out in pushing the game’s mechanics to their limit with a massive variety of modifiers to choose from, with even more unlocking after completion.

The use of Simon’s Quest style knockback is sure to invoke rage, especially as death results in the loss of ‘Sparks’ – a mechanic not too dissimilar to losing Shovel Knight’s gems. This time, Yacht Club has created a clever system in which enemies will absorb the spark orbs the player loses on their initial death, but they will still retain their ‘Bones’ upon failing. This allows players to choose to either carefully acquire more bones and level up before attempting to redeem spark orbs (leveling up also automatically replenishes sparks anyway), or spend them elsewhere instead of taking on the risk of potentially losing the chance to redeem them. This becomes more appealing once you acquire more spark slots, which provide even more opportunities to decide what you’re going to do with your bones before you lose them and raises the odds should you decide to keep them.

Despite the 2D Zelda trappings, Mina the Hollower is also more of an RPG than its contemporaries, as collecting a certain amount of bones allows the player to enhance Mina’s attack or defense stats and increase the power of sidearms. The leveling progression was perfectly paced for me during my 27-hour journey, maxing out as I reached the final areas and never once leaving me feeling like I was under powered approaching any of its non-linearly structured main areas.

Lost in the Tenebrous Isle

With acknowledgement to all of the praise that I have heaped on the game’s level design, which is fantastic, I still often found myself wishing for a more traditional map at points. While Yacht Club has put a considerable amount of effort into mitigating the need for a room-based map that can be pulled up at the player’s convenience, and I more than admire the efforts the designers have put in to connect the world so thoughtfully, I still found myself on various backtracking trips just wishing I knew what rooms were ahead and where I needed to reach.

At points the player is required to backtrack through areas to complete side quests or unlock parts of the main path, and during these points in which I needed to revisit areas before unlocking the fast travel options I frequently found myself getting lost or becoming exhausted by the magnitude of the main levels. Once the fast travel points have been found this obviously becomes less of an issue, but something to point me in the right direction would have shaved hours of aimlessly wandering around off of my playtime.

Likewise, if there’s anything I wanted more from in my time with Mina the Hollower, it absolutely would have been its story. The set-up is simple enough – the game opens with Mina traveling to the Tenebrous Isle at the request of Baron Lionel with the mission of restoring the island’s Spark Generators, its main source of energy, to their former state after they have begun mysteriously breaking.

Its premise is simple and immediately predictable, even falling into some similar tropes to Shovel Knight with a recurring rival Hollower in tow. While I enjoyed the personalities of Mina and Baron Lionel, their characterizations never become anything particularly memorable despite the game’s stronger emphasis on a traditional narrative than contemporaries such as Hollow Knight.

The world building and NPCs do the majority of the heavy lifting here, which is a relief as they are absolutely the star of the show. The blend of gothic Victorian horror with the whimsy of Don Bluth’s The Secret of Nimh is an atmospheric match made in heaven and it is all uplifted by some of the strongest pixel art in the entire medium, particularly bringing bosses to life with a dazzling sense of spectacle, particularly towards its conclusion. Locations and character designs are memorable and Yacht Club’s artists wield the GameBoy Colour inspired palette to their advantage across the game.

Jake Kaufman returns once again and delivers a brilliant soundtrack for the game, with a score that matches the energy of his prior work on Shovel Knight, at times surpassing it. His score heightens the atmosphere of each area and makes for some memorable chip-tunes that exemplify why he is one of the unsung heroes of video game music composition.

Verdict

Almost a full decade on from Shovel Knight, Yacht Club Games has returned in full form. Mina the Hollower is a joyously ambitious modern take on classic action-adventure games, blending carefully executed mechanics with a world that isn’t afraid to bite back, making for an experience that continuously empowers the player and rewards curiosity at every turn.