Explore every inch of a cursed island in an adventure that takes inspiration from the greats.
Here is a game that feels like an adventure. And it feels like it was an adventure to make, too. Mina the Hollower took six years to design and build, six years that took it from what sounds like a kind of coding doodle to a panoramic journey across a richly imagined island, taking in platforming and combat, puzzle-solving, and sheer immersion in the world building. It’s Zelda and it’s Bloodborne. It’s smacking bosses and reading the in-game newspaper. All of which is to say that those six years of design work are apparent throughout, in the complexity of the landscapes you travel, in the density of the secrets and the lore.
Mina the Hollower
This should all be overwhelming – and it very often is. But the basics are simple. The tone is one of gothic horror, but cute gothic horror. There are crypts and haunted houses and cursed farms, and at one point you get to fight a really angry ghost who isn’t skimping on the spectral spanner throwing. But you’re a little mouse with a determined frown, and while you leap canyons and drop-kick vampire bats, you also navigate skirting boards and sneak into new areas by ducking under tables and chairs.
And the set-up is everything a good Zelda-alike needs to be. There are a series of gadgets scattered around the island Mina finds themselves on, and they need to be reactivated. Each gadget takes you towards a different part of the island – eternal autumn, baroque graveyard, etc. etc. – and sees you travelling through different environments and tackling different kinds of enemies and bosses. You radiate outwards towards these targets from a central town that is always revealing new aspects of itself and, with that, new possibilities for launching you off in new directions. The twist is you need to puzzle out the way to reach new places yourself, by utilising your arsenal, talking to passersby and rattling through the daily newspaper in search of clues. Oh yes, and by writing things down.
Here’s a Mina the Hollower trailer to show it in motion.Watch on YouTube
This is important. Mina’s standard weapons come in the forms of whips or bashing shields or vast hammers of doom. These can all be leveled up and upgraded in interesting ways. But the most crucial thing I took along with me was a piece of paper and a pen. This is a game about encountering loose ends, about finding things that you either aren’t prepared for at the moment or – more likely – haven’t yet worked out how to think about correctly.
There’s the book on a high shelf in a library. How to get it down? There’s the roadblock that seems to mean you can’t cross the only bridge that leads to Septemburg, there’s the train station you can’t reach, the beach that leaves you able to see the place you want to get to next but with no obvious route to it. All of these things need to be tracked. Just like you’ll need to keep track of every residence back at the central town that has rooms you can’t yet access, every mirror that seems a bit iffy, every NPC that says something that sounds like it should be important if only it didn’t also sound like nonsense.
To me, this is the heart of the challenge here, as well as what makes Mina the Hollower so special. Its developers, grown up on the curious, interlocking spaces of Zelda and Bloodborne, are confident enough to confuse you a little bit. They’re confident enough to throw at you too much and yet, somehow, not quite enough, and then give you the room and the time to untangle it all. It’s confidence in the game design and in the warm embrace of genre – a genre where you’re constantly seeing things you can’t yet reach as part of a tradition that leads all the way back to a specific lake in the very first Zelda game. But it’s also confidence in you, the player. You’re a tiny mouse facing off against a whole island of horrors! But you can do this! You can fight the fights, jump the gaps, and untangle all the secrets.
(Years ago, someone explained to me that the most important number in the world – I may be expressing this incorrectly – was 7+/-2. Words to that effect certainly. They explained that this was the scope of human memory, or short-term memory at least. Most people can remember around seven things in any moment. Some people can remember five. Some lucky people can remember nine. But in that muddle we get phone numbers, shopping lists for a quick trip to the small Tesco, beats in a story, items on an itinerary. I have no idea if this is correct, and even as I type it, it starts to sound like the kind of too-easy wisdom of TikTok or Instagram Reels, but the important thing is this: If you’re the kind of person who’s terrified and overwhelmed by the limitations of your memory, Mina the Hollower should not put you off. Because it gives you too many things to remember, but then you get stuck – wonderfully, creatively stuck. And so you get to work through all of those dead ends in turn until you find you’ve ticked them off one by one.)
Image credit: Eurogamer / Yacht Club Games
I should add: the game is not purely memory and puzzles. That’s just the aspect that I feel gives me most access to its world and its imagination and sense of a place conjured from bright pixels. Most of the time you’ll be engaged in hectic and often brutal platforming gauntlets. This is a game of gaps and drops and spikes and ledges, some of them slippy-slidey, some of them riddled with lava, many of them ready to crumble underfoot. But it’s all viewed from above, so there’s an extra challenge to navigating jumps and working out which walls you can hop over and which are just too tall for you. Enemies can either come towards you across the ground or floating above it, so you constantly need to work out how to engage them. (Some are happy to switch, too. And speaking of enemies, my favs are a tie between the screaming turnip and the zombie snowman. This should give you some sense of the range here.)
Then there’s the burrowing. As a Hollower, Mina can dig into the ground and then pop up elsewhere. You can only stay underground for so long, so timing’s involved. And alongside utilising this as a dodge move, you’ll also need to work out how popping back up again impacts your jumps – crucial in environments where there are obstacles to burrow under but also those gaps to cross.
You can drill under certain objects to destroy them or pick them up, and you can also drill down in certain spots to find some of the game’s endless secret rooms. All great stuff, but muddling to the head, particularly when you chuck in combat. I ended up thinking of myself as a needle and thread, dipping in and out of cloth. That’s been enough just to help me untangle when I’m above ground and when I’m below it, and the options I have at either moment. And it’s given me the forward momentum to just rush through some of the game’s most evil challenges without letting my thinking get in the way. You’re often encouraged to give into momentum and aggression, too: the health system forces you to attack enemies to gain plasma that can then be converted back into HP. Only forward!
Alongside enemies and bosses and secret bosses and optional bosses, alongside slotting this huge jigsaw world together and working out, From Software-style, where the points are in which seemingly distant landmarks can be made to connect, there’s also a world of gadgets and upgrades and perks, or, to use the language of the game, trinkets and sidearms. Sidearms give you extra weapon opportunities but are easy to lose and run out of. Trinkets are more complex, letting you equip modifiers that change your character and allow for builds. Do you want to block the first lightning attack you receive or emit a damaging pulse when burrowing? Synergies and combos await. You can tailor Mina for a surprising array of approaches.
Image credit: Eurogamer / Yacht Club Games
All of these doodads can be unlocked in the world or bought in shops and then slotted in and out whenever you duck into the game’s underground equivalents of From Software bonfires. After a while, you’ll have levelled this place up sufficiently to allow you a map, too. But the map only tells you so much, laying out the loose arrangements of areas but not the clever ways they all connect.
Mina the Hollower accessibility options
Players can change weapon ability input to avoid triggers or multiple button presses, can remap controls, and alter screen shake. The game also has a truly astonishing range of modifiers and assist features that can do everything from changing game speed and reducing all enemy damage to altering the way healing works, changing the frequency of underlabs (bonfires), adding boss checkpoints and even making the game harder.
And ultimately it’s finding the connections for yourself that makes this game so compelling. I like bosses and combat, but I loved a moment early on where one part of the island dropped me into a taster session of another part, or where I unlocked a train. That train gets at the magic of the game quite brilliantly, actually: it’s not just that it’s a fast travel system. It’s that it’s also a freakin’ train. When you use it to go anywhere, you get to wander up and down the carriages, investigate, talk to people, and ponder a little more of the world you’re in. And sometimes…?
All this wrapped up in lovely chiptunes and Game Boy pixel art and all that lovely nostalgia stuff. And it’s a complex relationship. This game would not exist were it not for a handful of 8-bit classics. But the reason it’s so special, I suspect, is because it doesn’t only remember those classics, but it remembers the experience of first encountering them and the sheer wonder of that. And it remembers the imaginative leaps and dreams and what-ifs of their most committed fans.
A copy of Mina the Hollower was provided for this review by Yacht Club Games.
