The wait is finally over...

 

After 6 long years it’s finally here…

I remember when Shovel Knight launched and seeing it grow into one of the most popular indie games at the time. I knew this guy in high school who adored the game and randomly bought me a copy purely so I could try it out and I ended up loving it. This love persisted for years as expansion after expansion was released with Shovel Knight himself becoming a huge figure in the indie sphere in general. Due to my love for Shovel Knight, I of course immediately backed Mina the Hollower as soon as it was announced for kickstarter. A gameboy Zelda inspired action indie game made by Yacht Club Games? Sign me up oh my god. Backing it though, I didn’t realize just how long it’d take to release. 6 years felt like forever with how excited I was for the game, and the more news that was released for it, the more excited I was to play it! Well, that wait is no longer an issue now as Mina the Hollower has finally arrived! Finally, I can experience the game I’ve been hyped for for ages! The only question is if it still holds up despite the long wait…

You play as Mina, a world renowned scientist who’s famous for inviting the Spark Generators, massive towers of energy that give power and fuel to the island of Tenebrous. Things start to go awry though as Mina is called over for help as the Spark Generators have been destroyed by a former member of the Baron’s guard, Thorne, who believes the Spark Generators are the cause of the island’s slow destruction. Not knowing who to trust, Mina sets off to find out the truth and puts a stop to whoever is truly behind the mayhem on Tenebrous Isle. Truthfully, this plot doesn't do too much for me as it is incredible by the books with every single plot twist being incredibly predictable here. You know what’s going on by the end of the first area, and most of the game is just waiting for the big reveal to happen, going exactly as you expected it too. Granted, the characters in Mina are great here, having a fantastic blend of charm and humor behind them, but as an overall story it really doesn't do much. It’s not like I expected too much though, I found Shovel Knight’s story to also be a little bare bones with it only really picking up in the other campaigns so Mina having the same sort of setup doesn't surprise me too much. Graphically though, this game is an utter charm, perfectly taking what made the game boy look so wonderful and expanding it as much as possible with modern technology. Every single sprite here is a treat to behold and every single detail is just brimming with so much detail, it really nails making Tenebrous feel like a lived in island, and I’d find myself excited to see what the next area would look like. The soundtrack doesn't disappoint either, you got a returning Jake Kaufman and legendary composer Yuzu Koshiro working on it here, and it creates a soundtrack with constant banger tunes throughout. There is not a single bad track here, and I find myself blasting it from my own backer copy of it as I write this, it’s genuinely incredible.

As I previously mentioned, Mina the Hollower takes a lot of cues from the Game Boy Zelda games, and the overall structure is about the same here. You’ll be tasked with clearing 6 separate dungeons out in order to fix the spark generators. You’re free to tackle them in any order you like, mostly besides two of them that require some extra preparations, and once you clear all 6 you unlock the final dungeon that lets you beat the game. Each area follows the same standard gameplay loop and puzzles aren’t really that taxing with the game’s challenge coming more from the combat instead of the puzzle solving. Mina is quite an agile little mouse and she’ll need as much of that as possible in order to conquer the threats that haunt the island. Her main ability comes in the form of a burrow mood that lets her dig into the ground for a few seconds, popping out in front or behind each enemy and letting you get a quick hit in before popping back in to dodge the enemies attacks. This move is incredibly cathartic here and will be what you use the most throughout your playtime, being the game’s most central mechanic. Burrowing into the ground nerve really gets old either, with it staying just as satisfying as it did the first time throughout my entire 20 hour long adventure. Burrowing at the last second in order to dodge an enemy’s attack, discovering secret burrow points in order to find upgrades to better expand your arsenal, burrowing under pumpkins in order to pick them and smash them at foes, the game pushes this mechanic to its limit and even by the end of the game I found myself still needing to master it even though I thought I already had.  It gives this game an incredible sense of speed and flow state, and since it’s effectively your dodge in this game, combat becomes incredibly hectic and quick, forcing you to be just as fast as the enemies you face in order to not suffer an unfortunate demise.

You can’t just have combat with a dodge though, you gotta have some weapons to back it up and Mina has no shortage of cool weapons here. When you start the game, you’re given a few options in terms of weapon selection such as a basic whip, a hammer, a shield that focuses on parrying, basically whatever playstyle you need fulfilled Mina has you covered, and since you’re allowed to switch weapons at each save point, you can shift your playstyle to whatever best suits your situation. Each weapon can also be upgraded to be way better and they got some pretty sick upgrades hidden throughout the game such as an electric spark for your whip or a bomb jump for your shield, it’s very much worth going out the way for and they drastically alter how you approach each combat situation making the game much better to manage. I stuck with the whip personally as I found that its range and damage output helped fit my specific playstyle though I did wonder if it was a little overpowered as I ended up not dying much whenever I used it, dying a lot more anytime I switched to another weapon. Alongside your weapons you have various subweapons to find throughout your game, functioning like they would in Castlevania, letting you have a sidearm to help ease out the crowds when situations get tough. Most of these are pretty standard such as an Axe or a basic rock to throw, but you got some pretty sick ones like a dash that lets you regain health when phasing through enemies or an army of ghosts that attack anything that stands in their way. I found myself cycling through each of these a lot, as they all have situations that they all excel at with my personal favorite being the dash, as I found the health refill to help out in some tight situations. On top of that you can find various trinkets that grant Mina various little effects that you can mix and match to your liking. These suffer the same problems as other trinkets can in games where some are clearly better than others, but I ended up mixing my trinkets out a lot, never really sticking to one set for long.

Mina is not exactly an easy game though, Mina will test you throughout your journey and a lot of the game’s basic mechanics reflect the intense difficulty Mina has in store. Dying is the simplest to explain, functioning like the death mechanics in Souls game where you lose your currency if you can’t retrieve your spark back before your next death. Just like Dark Souls too, this currency is used to upgrade your defense and attack, making you need to be extra careful in order to save the right amount of bones that you need. As cool as this mechanic is though, unfortunately I think Mina becomes a little too easy to break with it. You can find some spark upgrades throughout the game that let you die more times before losing all your stuff, and bosses can only take away a set amount of sparks before you lose them forever. If you have any basic sense of exploration, you’ll discover all the upgrades rather quickly, and I ended up having 5 total deaths needed in order to lose my bones, with bosses taking a max of 4, meaning I never really had the threat of losing my currency less than halfway through the game. It makes dying more of an annoyance than something that has actual consequences behind it,and it meant I could just throw myself at the same boss over and over again until I eventually won, as there was 0 consequence for dying in said fight. The healing mechanic more than makes up for it though, adding a lot of friction to the standard “Estus Flask” heal. While most games require you to simply find a safe spot in order to heal, Mina will only heal up as much as a yellow bar on her health dictates. The way to increase this bar and heal more is to deal damage against enemies without getting hit yourself, meaning you can’t just duck away from a safe spot to heal, you have to get face first into the action in order to survive, and this led to an incredible tug and pull with the games basic systems. Whenever I needed to heal a ton of health, I found myself on edge constantly, as any single hit could lead to my death, and while I could just heal a low amount and keep doing it that way, I only have a limited number of vials, making me have to waste more resources in some already tricky boss encounters. It’s my favorite addition to this sort of mechanic, as I found the basic safe spot heal to be a little boring. Mina adding an actual challenge behind the health flasks is such a breath of fresh air, it’s easily my favorite new mechanic in the game, and it never got any less tense throughout my playthrough!

Mina isn’t all perfect though, the game’s difficulty curve is kinda terrible here. At the start of the game, I found myself getting my ass kicked constantly, dying left to right as I faced threats that seemed way too much for me. I was enjoying this difficulty as it made me have to learn just how each enemy exactly worked in order to avoid death myself, keeping me tense throughout each area. As soon as you beat the first and second dungeons though, this difficulty kinda became a joke. It was around that point that my sparks were above what bosses could take away from me, and normal encounters weren't enough to drain all my sparks away, so that threat of death simply got erased, meaning I could play it as risky as I wanted with 0 consequence to it. I simply stopped losing my currency by a certain point, and I stopped caring about dying by the end of the game. You can imagine my surprise when I reached the climax and I’m suddenly dying way more than usual. It’s easy to dismiss this as the game just naturally ramping up at this point, but I’m going to be so honest here a lot of the late game portions don’t feel well designed at all. The game will just start throwing a bunch of heavy hitting enemies in cramped spaces that make it near impossible to dodge everything, making me take a bunch of unnecessary hits that just felt unfair. The bosses were especially terrible at this, with some of their attacks being straight up impossible to dodge, and I could feel my frustration building up depending on the fight. I do not mind tough difficulty, I adore a good challenge and I think that friction is important in game design, but I despise it whenever the game starts to feel unfair and Mina starts to lean towards the unfair territory by the end.

I wanted to touch up on this subject matter here, but Mina has a system known as the variance mode that lets you apply certain modifiers to the game, letting you switch up how the game normally progresses. When this was first revealed, I must admit I was a little hesitant about its introduction. It’s not that the system itself is bad per say but I find that a lot of games add this mostly to make the game a lot easier, taking away a lot of challenges by giving you a simple I win button. I was incredibly worried Mina would be the same way as there are modifiers that do take away all the challenge, but Mina blocks you from completing feats when done, including stuff as simple as beating the game, and I really like that choice. I think a lot of games nowadays are too scared to have a proper challenge, with these easier buttons being given as a way to easily take it away with no real downside to turning these on. Mina having these options there at the cost of progression markers being taken away I think is a pretty good step to including them ,and while I personally would rather these not exist as I much prefer a more challenging experience that you can’t really escape from, I can at the very least have my sense of progression taken away, making me have much better reasons to keep engaging with the challenge. The other modifiers are pretty fun too, with a lot being just some dumb wacky stuff like adding damage numbers or turning the floor into lava. There not something I would mess with at all on a first playthrough and I think they should have been locked from the getgo till you beat it as letting you modify a good majority at the start does stink, but it’s cool that these even exist and I can see myself doing a lot of different playthroughs with the hard mode modifiers on in order to give Mina the difficulty it deserves.

All in all, I found Mina to be a pretty great playthrough most of the time! Its difficulty curve is pretty awful, but the combat helps to make up for it, staying pretty fast and hectic throughout despite how easy it ended up turning into. I’m hoping we get some balance patches in the future to help make the final area feel more fair, it really is just impossible to dodge attacks at points, and it’s a pretty big detriment to an overall great experience. It’s not my favorite release of the year, but it’s one that I ended up adoring greatly, and I’m glad that it’s finally out for me to enjoy! I’m excited to go clear up the rest of the feats after a few patches, but for now I think I’m satisfied with what I accomplished. This is an incredible follow up to Shovel Knight and I can’t wait to see what Yacht Club puts out next!