Mina the Hollower, the excellent new Zelda-inspired action RPG from Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games, stands out first for its action, which has few equals in the genre. Despite appearances, the game utilizes all three dimensions to their fullest. At the forefront of this is Mina’s burrowing—the trademark maneuver of the titular Hollowers. With an initial hop transitioning quickly into a long dive belowground before a final elongated vault back into the air, it acts as a fascinating, multi-stage dodge with seemingly unlimited potential for creative evasion, but only if your timing is just right.
Mina the Hollower’s weapons, too, demand and reward studious attention to detail. While they’re limited in number, each one would have enough personality to be the only weapon in the game. The whip that’s featured most prominently in Mina the Hollower’s art is plenty versatile, with its long-range extending strikes coming in handy in almost any situation. This contrasts with the hammer’s more specialized moveset, pairing quick offhand slaps with massive charged strikes that arc so high overhead they can take out flying foes.
And then there are the sidearms, which can be picked up from certain locations around the quite huge world and offer all sorts of funky utility, provided you can actually remember where to find them. You can thoughtfully employ axes which can be lobbed over obstacles, drills that rocket you recklessly ahead, and plenty more. It all makes for combat that’s often varied, rarely easy, and which compromises absolutely nothing for its top-down perspective.
Akin to Tunic, Mina the Hollower delights in leaving many of its mechanics entirely unexplained, despite you having access to them from the jump. In this way, it’s able to limit the scope of where you will likely explore not because you’re missing any particular upgrade, but simply because of your own ignorance. And then it puts you in situations which encourage you to learn for yourself, as if by happy accident, just what Mina has always been able to do.
This hands-off approach also extends to the broader shape of Mina the Hollower. Mina needs to repair a handful of spark generators that are scattered across the distant reaches of the game’s world. These generators are technological marvels that Mina just so happened to invent, and whose instability threatens the safety and prosperity of the kingdom. Aside from telling you how many spark generators need to be repaired and generally which direction to find them, though, the game leaves it to you to poke around and figure out exactly how to reach them. This free flowing exploration is encouraged further by something called sparks, which are Mina the Hollower’s spin on the type of death system popularized by the Souls games.
In the event that you die, you’ll lose your spark and need to retrieve it, usually from the enemy that killed you. But rather than losing all your carried currency (which doubles as XP), you keep it until you die again. This opens up the option to walk all the way back to a shop (provided you can get there alive) and spend your money like you have nothing to lose, or so you have nothing to lose. And while you start with only one spark, you can eventually upgrade your max capacity. It’s all a lovely sidestep of the tendency of games like this to get caught up in dead end boss-fight cycles, instead encouraging exploration as an alternative, less frustrating, solution.
Yacht Club has also pulled off something special in the way the game responds to your actions, but as usual, the developers have the confidence not to make a big deal out of it. Instead, you’ll figure out for yourself that hitting an arrow mid-flight will redirect it, and that electric damage only spreads as long as it hits water, and—hold on—did that knight just turn around because he heard my attack? Each little revelation is a new delight, and together they add up to a game that’s surprisingly physical, systemic, and, because of this, remarkably believable.
It all goes back to the magic trick that is Yacht Club’s raison d’être. It’s not that the simpler games of yore were really so much better than their modern, big-budget counterparts. Instead, the studio’s games are all about smuggling every ounce of modern design know-how into a deceptively simple retro-styled package. In this lineage, Mina the Hollower, in all its textured detail and ambitious expansiveness, counts as a new high-water mark.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Yacht Club Games.
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