Mina The Hollower | PC Review

Mina the Hollower, the newest game from Yacht Club Games after their runaway hit Shovel Knight, is an amazing game, and you should buy it and be playing it right now.

That’s it. That’s the review.

Hang on, I’m being told I need to write 800 more words.

The Actual Review

Mina the Hollower from Yacht Club Games is a top-down action adventure game in a similar vein as the Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Seasons games on the GameBoy Color. However, it’s quite a bit more than that. There’s heavy overtones of Bloodborne, aspects of Zelda 2, a massive interconnected open world, and a collection of accessibility options that ensure anyone can play regardless of their skill level.

The game opens with Mina, a legendary hollower and inventor, sailing to Tenebrous Isle to repair a series of Spark Generators, her own invention that are now providing power for the people on the island. On the way, the ship is attacked by a kraken, and you’re thrown overboard only to wash ashore with nothing but your chosen starting weapon. From there, you’re tasked with repairing the broken power generators scattered around the island. But not everything is what it seems…which is to be expected, because otherwise it would be dull.

Old School Made New

The game itself is very much steeped in old-school aesthetics and gameplay, but it’s got a few new tricks: along with your standard eight-directional movement and jumping, Mina can burrow into the ground, avoiding enemy attacks and allowing you to reposition and also increase your jump distance. It’s key to making your way through the world, along with understanding the various platforming gimmicks you encounter, and there’s a lot of those. Just when you think Yacht Club can’t pull any more tricks off their big boat, they throw you another one.

There are also a lot of little touches throughout that make the island feel vibrant and alive. The main city of Ossex has its shops and wandering civilians, sure, but it also has people who are down on their luck and asking for a helping hand. In true old-school gaming fashion, everyone in town has something to say, and oftentimes that something is a hint about a secret or a hidden treasure. Even something as innocuous as jumping in a leaf pile can trigger something you wouldn’t expect, and something that will have you poking at every single thing you see, just in case something else happens.

There’s plenty of material rewards to find on the island as well, with every screen teasing secrets, shortcuts, and potential treasures. It truly rewards exploration and experimentation, and it helps that the island is a truly open world. At no point do you ever acquire additional movement tech that unlocks new areas. You can tackle the island’s zones and dungeons in pretty much any order you want, and they all have their own individual quirks and gimmicks. The dungeons themselves are more linear than the more maze-like Zelda dungeons, but still contain plenty of puzzles and challenges to surmount before challenging the game’s bosses.

One Mouse vs The World

And make no mistake, this is a challenging game. There’s a very steep learning curve in the beginning for sure, when you can’t take many hits and have to learn the ropes quickly to avoid dying repeatedly. You also have the Soulsborne staple of losing your bones, this game’s currency, when you die-die, but Mina starts with one spark, which effectively acts as a mulligan for that. Recover your spark, and you can die again without losing your bones. Die with no spark, and you lose your accumulated currency. However, as the game progresses, you’ll increase both your damage, defense, and life, and gain more sparks, which has the interesting effect of making the game easier as you go, even as the enemies get harder. Typical Souls-like.

Even so, don’t be afraid! If you’re not the kind of player that typically dives into Souls-likes, that’s okay. The game comes with a huge amount of accessibility options out of the box that let you make things easier, harder, or just plain weird. Want to take less damage or burrow longer? Done. Want to cancel the ‘lose all bones on death’ bit? Go for it. Infinite health? Who’s going to stop you in a single player game? You can even make things harder by turning up your damage taken, lose your stat increases on level-up, and so on. Now, some of these options do disable the in-game feats and maybe Steam achievements, but I don’t pay attention to those anyway. Play how you want, because Yacht Club Games obviously wanted everyone, regardless of their git-gud-edness, to be able to enjoy their game.

800 Words Later

I’m going to reiterate what I said at the beginning: Mina the Hollower is a fantastic game and for $20 USD, it is a stone-cold steal. My first playthrough took about 15 hours, but I also didn’t even collect half the game’s items. This isn’t even counting New Game+, of which there are…let’s say “options”. Bottom line, the Shovel Knight folks have done it again. Go buy it.

To hear me talk more about Mina the Hollower, be sure to listen to the May 29th, 2006 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast.

This review is based on a PC copy of Mina the Hollower provided by the developer for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2.