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With Mina the Hollower, Yach Club Games has cemented itself as one of the premier independent studios in the industry today. Its breakout hit Shovel Knight was a retro throwback platformer that merged classic 8-bit style action with some modern touches. Mina the Hollowerer looked similarly old school with a look and feel that obviously pays tribute to the Zelda Game Boy spin-offs, but this time the fusion of newer Soulslike design sensibilities makes it more than a freshened up homage. It resembles those Zelda games, but it's so densely packed with secrets and intertwining cause and effect outcomes that at times it feels more like Elden Ring than Link's Awakening. The comparisons to Link's Awakening and Game
Boy Color games Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages are visually obvious. But whereas those games were relatively simple iterations on the template set by the classic Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past, Mina the Hollower is much darker, much denser, and much more difficult. The challenge level can be brutal and unforgiving, and there are elements of Gothic horror, body horror, and gruesome violence, at least as expressed through cute pixelated animals. The story starts when Mina gets a letter from Baron Lionol, the leader of Tennibros Isle, who requests her with the island's power generators. Mina is a hollower, a sort of structural engineer and earth scientist. Mina is the best of
them, having invented the spark technology that powers the generators, which in turn makes all of the modern technological wonders of Tennibros possible. But the generators have been breaking down. So Mina is asked to come see to the problem. After her boat to Tennibros is attacked by a monster, Mina chooses her weapon. You're presented with just three at the start. And already this feels like a statement of intent. Link's trusty sword has always seen him through. And Mina's twin daggers, Whisper and Vasper, offer a very similar play feel. But this time you could also select the night star, a whip-like morning star with longer reach, or the blast strike maul, a massive blungeoning hammer. The message, which becomes even clearer as you play,
is that this is a game that wants you to take combat seriously. Once you make landfall and enter the city of Osex, you start to gain a better idea of what's going on. The generators have been sabotaged by an ecotterist named Thorne. Lionel tasks Mina with going to repair the six main generators surrounding the city, and you're vaguely pointed in a handful of directions to pursue. It's not immediately clear where to go. The city itself is massive and bustling, loaded with named characters who all drop meaningful bits of information. A city newspaper points you to the direction of a dungeon. But the fact is that you can do them in almost any order. The dungeons themselves are unique. Rather than enter into a bespoke
dungeon area, they are built into the structure of the world itself. You might weave your way through crypts or caves or swamps while exploring, but there is no clear delineation between the open world and a dungeon. It's all part of the same cohesive connected reality. There are often shortcuts and secret passageways connecting pieces of the world together, making it feel even more a part of a whole. Even so, the parts of the world have their own distinct personalities that each feel inventive and fresh. My first quest was to Queensberry Crypt to the east, a creepy graveyard full of tombs and statues. Then I went to September, a personal favorite, a harvest themed farm town being
terrorized by a spooky monster that the locals call the Carving Man. The Carving Man ends up stalking you, introducing a surprising survival horror element. Every dungeon is just packed with touches that make them feel distinct. Unlike a traditional Zelda game, though, you aren't obtaining new items in each dungeon. At first, I missed this element, but I found that Mina the Hollowerer didn't need it. Items in Zelda games help to facilitate new types of puzzle or platforming challenges, but Mina manages to maintain such a constant pace of fresh reinvention without items.
The world and dungeon design itself kept the same pacing by themselves. Progress isn't gated behind keys, but rather behind skill. If you can reach from one end of the room to another, you can proceed. That is made all the more impressive by how absolutely dense the world is. Every screen is packed with interconnected secrets and things to uncover, many of which you may not even realize are there the first time you tried past them. I've completed the game and I still don't feel like I've even scratched the surface. The world is so complex, intertwining, that I suspect players will be experimenting and discovering new things for some time.
Combat is similarly nuanced. In addition to the three starter weapons, you have access to more that can be found or bought. Each one can be upgraded and all of them have their own intricacies. I preferred the twin daggers because it felt most familiar to me with its quick short range strikes, but I also had to adjust to its rhythm of two quick stabs in succession. The Night Star has reach and flexibility, but also means you have to commit to an attack and so on. You don't need to master all of them, but they each feel precise enough to accommodate someone's play style. In addition to your main weapon, you'll find sidearms, which deplete a mana pool. Those could be a heavy axe that you can toss Allah Castlevania, an
umbrella that blocks enemy attacks and then can be thrown, a boomerang like throwing disc, a pet beast that follows you around on a leash, and more. There are tons of sidearms, and it's always exciting to find a new one, and see how it mixes up gameplay and adds to your combat options. Combat is one area, and the only one where Mina the Hollower's ambition mildly exceeds its grasp. This game admirably iterates on the form and function of classic Game Boy Zelda games, but those were never built for complex combat. Mina succeeds in giving this structure style a much higher skill ceiling, but it isn't flawless. With a flattened 2D perspective, it's not always clear when enemies are in the
air, requiring a jump attack to make contact. Many enemies charge directly at you, which makes the lack of a dodge or backstep command stand out. Instead, you can jump or jump into a burrow and dig underground. Both of those do in a pinch, but it does feel like combat is just slightly straining against the limitations of its homage. Mean of the Hollower is brutally difficult at times. Boss battles can be especially tricky, but even a handful of regular enemies can take you down. Your safe spot is the underlab, an underground base you burrow into where you can heal and swap equipment. Sometimes underlabs are spread very thin, and you'll be desperate to find the next one because you're on the verge of death. Runbacks between underlabs and
bosses can be unforgiving and require several tries. You can track a vial to restore your health, but you have a limited number of uses. Dying means losing your spark, after which you have one chance to regain it before you lose all your currency. The difficulty is certainly an intentional choice, and slight reservations about the combat's limitations aside, it does feel great to have your skills tested and slowly feel yourself improving. Like any other game in the Soulslike genre, you do actually need to get good. Unlike a Soulslike game though, you can actually make the game easier on yourself. Mina the Hollower has loads of optional modifiers, reducing damage, adding more underlap save points, adjusting the
world's speed, and so on. It's generous enough to let you turn on as many or as few as you'd like. You can even make it harder if you're looking for that additional challenge after mastering the mechanics, and even more are added after game completion, giving you a massive array of different things to try that will either add limitations or even more freedom. Bones occur by defeating enemies and exploring. You can buy stacking upgrades to strength, defense, or sidearm mana, or you can convert your pool into bone stone, which is kept safe in your underlab, and therefore can't be lost when you die. Bones can also be used to buy a variety of permanent upgrades for Mina, or weapons, upgrades,
various items, or trinkets. Trinkets are one of the most important aspects to customizing Mina to your play style. These have strong effects like extending your burrow time, letting you carry extra health vials or even giving you a one-time emergency revive. None of these are strictly necessary for completion like items in a Zelda game, but many of them are extremely useful, and combining them as you find new ones as part of the joy of learning and earning your own safe path through this dangerous world. As impressed as I was throughout, Mina the Hollower finishes especially strong with a pair of final dungeons that are somehow even more bursting with creativity. Whereas every dungeon up to
that point had its own distinct flavor and personality, the last few hours packed multiple ideas and puzzle types into single dungeons, making them a feast of creative level design that honestly at some points felt like Yach Club was just showing off. Upon restoring each generator, you find a letter, most of them from Thorne, the eotterrorist, who is always one step ahead of you in sabotaging the generator. Thorne describes his reasoning and implores you to rethink helping Lionol. For a generation raised by ecotainment like Ferngully and Captain Planet, it was clear from the start where all of this was going. However, the execution found room for surprising churns. This is a fable about environmentalism, but it's not clean or preachy. Fixing the generators has
positive effects on the world, but Thoren's destruction of them does, too. It seems like this world is stuck in a devil's bargain where they become too reliant on technology to stop now without incurring heavy costs. But they can't safely continue either. Any path leads to pain. It certainly resonates. I am aed by what Yach Club Games has created here. Mina the Hollower is so ambitious and dense and sprawling that it is hard to believe that it is contained in such a modest presentation. It surpasses the boundaries of mere homage or retro throwback to become something new, fresh, inventive, and exciting. Shovel Knight was a welldeserved successful debut for yacht club. Mina the hollowower may be its
masterpiece.
