Over a decade since Yacht Club Games made its mark on the indie scene with Shovel Knight, the studio is finally back with its next big nod to retro games, Mina the Hollower.
Instead of going the 2D platformer route again, Mina the Hollower lives and dies on the melding of 2D Zelda exploration with Souls mechanics, and whether or not you are a fan of those two styles of games will really shape your attitude towards this adventure. Personally, I love Zelda games but despise Souls-likes.
This conundrum leaves me with an interesting perspective on Mina the Hollower because I can acknowledge that it is a great game made with a lot of care, but there’s also a large part of the game that just never gelled with me.
The main focus of Mina the Hollower is combat and exploration. For the particular person who loves all of the influences that built this game, you will absolutely be endeared. If one of those pillars doesn’t vibe with you, I don’t think it will win you over as much.
Mina the Hollower is a very challenging game right from the beginning. The challenge isn’t unfair, and people who enjoy being tested will likely come away with that “I died, but it was my fault” feeling. Personally, I don’t feel the satisfaction of overcoming a boss fight that I died to 50 times. I just get more frustrated at myself for continually failing.
When it comes to combat overall, I was left quite disappointed. Mina is quite slow and vulnerable to damage, especially in the opening portions of the game.
Until you get plenty of upgrades and are used to dodging flying enemies and avoiding falling down pits, you will die a lot, and every time you die, you drop your spark, which holds all of your bones, the not-Souls currency of this game that buys everything and will improve your stats over time. If you die again before going to pick them up, they are lost forever, leading to a lot of grinding to replace what you lost.
That leads me to another Souls function I have always hated: the flask, called vials here. As you take damage, you can press Circle to use up one of Mina’s vials to heal yourself. If you are low on health, you will want to land some attacks on an enemy to build up your plasma, which is denoted as an orange bar that shows how much health you will regain if you use a vial.
Taking more damage will require you to land more hits on enemies to get that health back, and when you use it, you are a sitting duck for what feels like forever. If you get hit while Mina is preparing the vial, not only are you knocked out of the healing animation, but you lose one precious vial, punishing you extra in a tense situation.
Later on, the game does use vials in an interesting way as a form of payment in very particular cases, but trying to use them with any enemy in sight in battle is tedious, and wouldn’t be made better until hours later, when I could get my hands on a trinket that sped up the healing process. Unfortunately, I had already changed courses by that point.
One of the best claims Yacht Club Games can have with Mina the Hollower is the large menu of modifiers available right from the start. Unfortunately for Trophy hunters, putting any of these on to make life a little easier will permanently disable Trophies for your profile, but I was ready to take that sacrifice to get through.
You can adjust many things with modifiers, all separated into categories of visual changes, things that make the game harder or easier, and affect things like enemy behavior. You can almost completely tailor this game to how you want it to be.
I decided to take my frustrations with the healing system out of the game and used the Healing Plasma modifier, which makes it so you automatically heal yourself every time you land a hit on an enemy. I also added checkpoints right before boss fights, and later on, added a multiplier to my bones accumulation to make up for the times I was dying.
If you decide to go down a similar route, I recommend being careful if you want to lower the difficulty, but keep a somewhat challenging experience. While I didn’t want the full Souls experience, I accidentally ended up making the game too easy.
You can completely break this game, which I did enjoy for walking around out of bounds with the walk on pits modifier, but there is also a part of me that didn’t want this to be a complete cake walk. Instead of wasting my time on battles, enemy encounters and boss fights became a minor speed bump where I just spammed my attack until I came out on top.
I spent countless hours in this game, completely lost on where to go next. Just leaving the town in the beginning was challenging because I had never seen this area before and had no idea how to avoid the debris lying about in the beginning portions and reach where I needed to go.
I was completely walking blind and didn’t learn until after finishing the first tower that the newspaper stand in town can give you hints on which way to go. It still didn’t tell me how to get there, but at the very least, hearing that there was a swamp to the west that I should explore gave me something to set out for. Having a main NPC to just give you directions would have been such a nice, small feature to make this better.
Conclusion
Mina the Hollower is a good game for people who love the idea of mixing Zelda with Dark Souls. Unfortunately, if you don’t fully love what that entails, I don’t think it will win you over as much as others. For some, they will find the combat challenging in a good way, with a world you can get lost in. Others will see a series of roadblocks thrown in the player’s face as they try to navigate those problems. Regardless of if you think the sum of its parts makes a masterpiece or not, Mina the Hollower was clearly crafted with a lot of passion and care.
