I find myself compelled to dive back into Mina the Hollower for another playthrough โ this is my third, in fact (NG+3). It’s rare for me to finish a game and immediately restart it, without a pause to miss it. Yet, with Mina the Hollower, I’ve done just that, and I suspect many will follow suit. I’m eager to play it again and again, until the end of the world or until I simply grow tired of it, whichever comes first.
Mina the Hollower is the new offering from Yacht Club Games, the studio behind Shovel Knight. Much like its predecessor, this game aims to evoke the spirit of a specific console era, this time the Game Boy, mirroring Shovel Knight’s NES inspiration. Working within the constraints of 256×144 pixels (the Game Boy’s resolution is 160×144; the added width is one of the artistic liberties the studio has taken), Yacht Club masterfully blends elements of Zelda, Castlevania, and Bloodborne. The narrative follows Mina, an inventor returning to Thistle Island years after contributing to the creation of its spark generators. These generators once brought prosperity to the island, but now, as Baron Lionel informs Mina, they’ve failed, with sabotage being the prime suspect.
Mina’s somewhat rough arrival on the island marks the beginning of an adventure where its influences are clearly recognizable, yet the game never veers off its intended course. Nearly all of Mina the Hollower’s core mechanics are presented within its opening moments: a minimal yet incredibly versatile moveset, allowing for impressive maneuvers with just three buttons; a dynamic interplay of verticality, featuring three distinct layers โ the ground, the upper level, and the subterranean depths where Mina can hide to bypass obstacles or enemies and move with increased speed. These layers form the foundation for combat challenges, world maps, and dungeons alike. The structure is simultaneously open and labyrinthine, filled with hidden corners and secrets, yet deceptively traditional, with distinct “levels” progressing from checkpoint to checkpoint. There are also familiar mechanics, such as the destructible candelabras hiding energy and sub-weapons reminiscent of Castlevania, and bones that, akin to the Souls series, serve as both experience points and currency. In essence, this is Mina the Hollower: exploration, tight and demanding combat, and imposing bosses, all presented within minutes.
Following the introduction, the game unfolds with a sense of relative normalcy. Your objective is clear: activate the six generators scattered across the island before you can power up the central one located in Ossex, the capital and the primary hub around which the world is built. Despite the initial freedom the game offers, the structure is surprisingly straightforward. Much like in Zelda titles, Ossex serves as a gateway to a world that you gradually learn to navigate. Accustomed to the Zelda-esque tradition, which also shares elements with Metroid, I initially expected to require specific abilities or items to access seemingly unreachable areas. The game is brimming with points of interest: a chest here, a buried skull there, a hidden path tucked away in a screen corner that you’re unsure how to reach. By following the most apparent routes, I eventually found myself in another region, then a dungeon, followed by a final boss and a generator. While anticipating a “game-changing moment” โ the point where you receive an item that magically unlocks previously inaccessible locations โ I progressed through the initial challenges without excessive concern. Everything gradually falls into place; there’s no need to worry.
However, Mina the Hollower deviates from the typical Metroidvania formula. It leans more towards being a Metroidbrainia. There’s no single “game-changing moment.” Upon completing the first dungeon, you possess nothing you didn’t have upon first arriving in Ossex. You may have gained a few levels, a slightly increased health bar, or discovered a sub-weapon or gadget you hadn’t encountered before, but you haven’t acquired any new powers or tools that fundamentally alter your interaction with the game. What you have is what you’re given, and the remarkable aspect is how Mina the Hollower explores the full potential of these basic initial abilities, encouraging you to engage with its world and experiment with your current tools to find ways to traverse Thistle Island. Each map area features its own unique gimmick, a distinct method of utilizing the game’s core mechanics to create specific challenges that are consistently fresh and engaging. Often, these ideas are layered upon one another, forming increasingly complex puzzles that you must decipher while fending off the myriad dangers present on the map.
For me, this is the game’s core strength and the reason I felt compelled to start anew immediately after my first playthrough. To what extent does the game allow you to go anywhere, anytime? It offers this freedom in a truly refreshing manner, drawing more parallels to games like Dark Souls II, Elden Ring, or the original NES Zelda, rather than Link’s Awakening or the Oracle series. Without delving into unnecessary detail (I believe there’s immense value in understanding how Mina the Hollower functions, in learning to navigate its world and discover its secrets with minimal guidance; there’s no map, for instance, and quite frankly, it doesn’t need one), this structure ensures that your adventure with Mina is profoundly your own. While not strictly dictated by your choices, the path you take is determined by the game’s branching and diverging routes, which are precise yet often inscrutable. It creates the sensation of playing a vast RPG where anything can happen, where you might be surprised by an unexpected combat encounter, an NPC you’ve never seen before, or storylines that open and close based on decisions you make, consciously or without realizing your actions. My first playthrough was overwhelming, magical, and uniquely mine; my second confirmed that this wasn’t a fluke. The game is meticulously designed to provide precisely that kind of experience.
This aspect is fascinating, but the moment-to-moment gameplay holds up for more concrete reasons. The combat, for example, is challenging but consistent with the rest of the game. You must learn to read your enemies, anticipate their movements, and understand their role in the specific location where they appear upon entering a room. They aren’t placed randomly but occupy very deliberate positions, typically to make your life progressively more difficult in creative ways. Enemies are just one element of interest in each area, and you quickly learn to scrutinize every seemingly casual detail for openings to dig through or ways to reach locations you may have seen hours earlier while exploring a different part of the map that, in your mind, was on the opposite side. The gadgets and sub-weapons add a layer of customization and variety, allowing a single area to feel radically different simply by changing your equipped items. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Mina the Hollower a build-focused game, you can certainly tailor your approach to suit your needs or preferences, making your adventure slightly easier, slightly harder, or opening up new methods of traversing each zone. This flexibility, ultimately, imbues the hyper-pixelated format of this futuristic Game Boy Color with an epic action RPG, possessing an ambition and adaptability rarely seen in many of its peers, most of which are more limited precisely because they impose fewer restrictions on themselves.
It’s likely within these limitations that the true secret of Mina the Hollower lies, in plain sight. By design, it makes a colossal effort to maximize legibility, to grow in density rather than sheer size, placing a locked door, a secret path, or an unexpected encounter around almost every corner. It’s not that my first playthrough, those initial thirty hours with Mina, felt insufficient, but I suspected there was more to uncover than I could grasp in one go. I was not mistaken. The remarkable thing is that I still feel that way; not only because there are still empty slots in the menus suggesting I have yet to find everything, but because I know there are stories to conclude, challenges to overcome, and characters to assist. When I’ve accomplished everything, when the game practically begs me to leave, pleading that it has nothing more to offer, I’ll likely still have the feeling that at any moment something could change, that a secret could magically manifest, independent of the programmers’ and designers’ intentions, as if the game had come to life and was pulsating on its own accord. This is what I think of Mina the Hollower: it is alive. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to start NG+3.
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