I’m halfway through like, six games right now, and I’ve dropped all of them to play Mina the Hollower. This game managed to catch me off-guard even though I adored Shovel Knight, and even backed Mina the Hollower on Kickstarter way back when. That’s an unexpected benefit to crowdfunding games that take years to finish: By the time it’s out, you’ve forgotten about the money you spent. It feels like I got Mina the Hollower for free.
Kerry Brunskill nailed it in their 90% review: This game is pure joy. Like Balatro before it, one of the most exciting things about Mina is that there was no technological barrier that kept it from being made: Someone could have created this game or something approximating it at any point in the past 30+ years, but it took this specific Yacht Club team to sculpt it out of the ether.
It doesn’t feel like there’s any intervention of modernity in Mina’s look and feel. Its install size is counted in bytes mega, not giga. It feels like Yacht Club could have made something at least 70% as good and surprising as a ROMhack of Link’s Awakening—and I mean that as a compliment. There’s surely a degree of “as you remember it” magic to the rendering at work here, not unlike Shovel Knight, but the dev leans toward the light touch and of that spectrum, as ever.
As Kerry pointed out, there’s a bleeding edge sensibility to Mina the Hollower’s level design, a real FromSoft cast to how dense the world is, and the way it keeps folding back in on itself. “Elden Ring GameBoy Demake” is a frequent meme/beginner programming project you’ll stumble across online, but here Yacht Club actually pulled it off as a feature-length game.
Yacht Club has been open about the fact that it needed Mina to be a hit after its long gestation. Thankfully, early signs are that we’re on the “make” side of this make-or-break moment, with Mina the Hollower selling 300,000 copies in three days.
Mina the Hollower manages one of my favorite level design tricks: The sense of “wait, it keeps going? When does it end?” I’ve beaten one story dungeon so far, and it was a real winner, boasting a secret boss and optional tricky escort quest that tied into the tragic story of the level’s boss. That dungeon was killer, but it’s been the overworld and optional areas that have really done it for me.
The central town of Ossex is one part Firelink Shrine, one part Hyrule Castle Town, and one final dash of CRPG or immersive sim hub: There’s so much to do, so many layers to peel back. You get the classic: Buildings you can see but not enter on your first visit, demanding you approach the burg from later zones to access them. Others only appeared that way to me, but I really could have gotten in there at any time if I was creative enough—turns out the secret entrance was right there if only I’d been more attentive.
Last night, I stayed up an hour later than I’d planned in order to finish the craziest sidequest I’ve seen yet. It began as an escort mission—one of only nine types of quest, depending on who you ask—a new little bioluminescent moth friend wants you to walk her through a pitch-black tunnel. On the plus side, she emits a bit of light to help you through the darkness, and every few seconds becomes incandescent, lighting up the entire screen.
Only one problem: When she goes full lightshow, she’ll launch you a few feet away, and the main body of her escort mission sees you traversing a narrow catwalk over deadly drops. I was getting extremely heated with her by the end of our time together, ready to throw hands with my temporary insectoid companion.
Helpfully, Mina the Hollower gave me just such an opportunity. After arriving at our destination, my moth companion hulked out and attacked, challenging me to the toughest boss fight I’ve yet encountered in this fairly challenging game.
I love everything about this sequence: Its out of the way, optional nature, the deliberately trolling, frustrating design, and the deliciously cruel twist of my charge turning against me at the 11th hour. Every sidequest and side area I’ve encountered in Mina the Hollower carries a similar feeling of substance and surprise, the same qualities that made me love the side stuff in The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk: 2077.
RPG,Games#Mina #Hollower #sidequests #game1780848868
