Mina the Hollower Reviews

The polish and attention to detail in this game is a rare thing to see but always makes for something incredible whenever it happens. There are some clear zelda and castlevania flavors here, a hint of souls as well, but I wouldn't go in expecting something that feels quite like any of those, this game has created it's own distinct identity while paying homage to these other games, and has taken it as far as it could go with the phenomenal level design and general feel, this game is just Mina. Every aspect of the game from combat to just moving around feels fantastic, though occasionally frustrating with the difficulty, this is not an easy game by any means, it never feels unfair and overall feels very satisfying and fun to overcome. This game has the type of difficulty where every single tile and enemy placement feels like there was some sort of intent behind it, it never feels hard just for the sake of being hard, but as a way to push the player to really master the systems and think creatively. There are also a million different settings that feel like cheat codes without the part where you look up the codes online and type them in, including a built-in randomizer. I spent a good 20 minutes just scrolling through the menu wondering what the devs were on when they made some of this, and I mean that in the best way possible, I love when games add silly things that exist for no reason other than to exist and be something you can technically do if you really want to. I don't think this game will appeal to everyone, but for me it's been a blast, and if it has a chance to be your flavor of fun, I believe there is something special here, and it's absolutely worth giving a shot.

This is one of those games yet again where I wish I could give a mixed review. Mina the Hollower is not bad, but it is heavily flawed in ways that make me very sad. This game is incredibly frontloaded with difficulty, and then once you start gaining the trinkets you can generally facetank about a solid 85% of the game. I even managed to facetank the final boss of the game. You also can level up, and leveling up is very easy to do as you can grind the currency of the game "bones" super fast. The level design relies a lot on your platforming skills, but the general movement mechanics are very clunky and trying to mimic older style games. This would be fine if enemies also obeyed these rules, but they do not. It's like the joke of the Medusa heads from Castlevania was actually real. There's so much nonsense everywhere at all times that due to the retro style graphics, it becomes genuinely difficult to parse what's happening. Which is a shame, because I LOVE the Gameboy Color aesthetic. The trinkets absolutely trivialize the game. There are certain combos that are incredibly strong and can lead to the aforementioned facetanking I mentioned before. However between them and the weapons, I say if you do enjoy this game a lot that there is the option for incredible build variety. This game honestly feels like it has no idea what it wants to be. I can't tell if it wants to be more like a Soulslike, or more like older Legend of Zelda games. For the non-gameplay elements, the story is meh. Whatever you think is gonna happen is probably gonna happen, and I struggle to remember any characters outside of the main ones. A lot of NPCs in this game are just Final Fantasy 1 style hint givers with no extra flavor of personality. This leads to the final bit, exploration. This is one where I think it's incredibly rewarding. Although I did not get everything, there's so many hidden paths, off the main path paths, etc full of genuinely good rewards. It's also not too cryptic with its hints on where to go next, and the newspapers tell you a general good idea of what to do. The fast travel though is very mediocre, and I don't blame players for not knowing it's even a thing at first. There is also minigames you can find in your travels. I only found two, but they were frustrating and the rewards were not worth it honestly. Probably the part I kinda hate the most is how they handle the accessibility features to change difficulty. While I agree with people that turning on modifiers that make the game easier can make achievements feel less good, it's also a case of they should have just made proper difficulties. No the presets do not count. It can feel very othering to have modifiers like this disable achievements. Speaking of accessibility, do NOT play this game if you have photosensitive epilepsy. The game has an insane amount of flashing lights, especially one trinket you get later on that has a very good effect. I even found myself getting headaches at points due to it and needed breaks. Even old arcade games weren't this aggressive with the flashing, and honestly I don't know how Yacht Club Games isn't getting into legal trouble for this. Obviously I don't need to tell you this game runs fantastically on the Steam Deck with 60 fps stable and great battery life. I'd be more shocked if it didn't honestly. Overall I think this game is okay. It's not one I'd recommend to most people, but I appreciate Yacht Club Games having a vision and sticking to it. Hopefully they make some changes that eventually make it more fun to play for less hardcore difficulty enthusiasts. Also I want Mina plushie. Unrelated to this all of course.

Do note that when people say this game is a souls-like, they don't mean it's a hard game with a dodge roll, they mean it's an action RPG with healing items that take a moment to use while replenishing at checkpoints, and that it has a currency that doubles as your means of leveling up that you can lose if you die too many times in a row. That aside, this is a great action RPG that you should not miss if you love a good challenge.

At its core, [b]Mina the Hollower[/b] feels tailor-made to unify old and new gamers alike without over-committing to the generation it comes from. It's a celebration of the past that still feels modern. Yacht Club Games has a knack for walking that line, and I'm very glad they made this instead of another Shovel Knight sequel. There’s just something magical about going in with expectations, only to be surprised at every turn of your playthrough when you keep discovering elements of the game you were not expecting to exist in it. It was easy for me to watch the trailers and presume that we would be getting “Shovel Knight but with Links Awakening as the inspiration rather than Duck Tales and Mario 3.” I had zero idea we were going to see so many varied movesets and gameplay-altering trinkets that drastically change the way you approach combat, as well as a pretty masterful non-linear approach without sacrificing difficulty. The timeless writing from Shovel Knight has returned, and it has a few unexpected twists in how it frames the hero’s journey that I found refreshing. Combat is worth an examination, as it will make or break the average player’s feelings about the bulk of the game. Your options are fairly limited in the beginning, and while that can feel off-putting, you are never thrown enough hardships to taint these limitations. You have your variation of weapons that determine if you want fast and weak or slow and dangerous, and you have your dodge in the form of burrowing, something that does take practice to perfect. This is a game that was born and raised in a Castlevania and Zelda household, only to go to school and be influenced by its Bloodborne teacher to identify as a soulslike. Ultimately, while it wants to be a soulslike, it still is a blending of Castlevania and Zelda, with its emphasis on exploration, platforming, light-puzzles, sub-weapons, and sense of adventure. It just so happens to have Bloodborne’s tones, monster-designs, healing, and death-system. It’s a gamble, and one that I found enjoyable since I just so happen to love all of this, but I can see how some gamers might not like this blending of the past and present. One of the more impressive elements is how the soundtrack and audio design feel like a glorious callback to the best of the Game Boy era. Those impact sounds and bounces tickle the dopamine receptors perfectly. The game embraces the limitations of that style without feeling constrained by them, delivering one memorable track after another. Overall, Mina the Hollower feels like a game made by developers who genuinely love the history of the medium. It borrows from Zelda, Castlevania, Bloodborne, and plenty of other influences, but never feels content to simply imitate them. As someone approaching 40, I was constantly reminded of why I fell in love with games in the first place: curiosity, discovery, and the feeling that there might be something unexpected around the next corner. In a genre space where I've started to feel some Soulslike fatigue, Mina managed to surprise me anyway. Please enjoy it!

I beat the game with a 100% items but not 100% achievements and I'll be honest I don't see myself even trying considering what they ask (speedrunning, deathless/flawless, trickshots, etc) It's so hard because I really wanna like the game and I mean I liked (or maybe just tolerated) it enough to get 100% item completion and beat it, but like... man that was really not fun to play, was it? [h2]Things I liked:[/h2] [h3][b]Exploration:[/b][/h3] I think the maps were very well designed and discovering all the different secrets and hidden stuff as well as opening shortcuts etc. was VERY fun and exciting. Definitely Mina's strongest point when it comes to gameplay. Uncovering parts of the world and finding new things felt good and rewarding. I like how areas loop back into each other etc, it makes the world design feel connected and believable. 10/10 on this no questions asked. [h3][b]Music:[/b][/h3] I'm not even a big fan of chiptune/8-bit music even as someone who grew up with it, but the game's soundtrack is phenomenal and memorable and they knocked it out the park here. "A Sinking Feeling" is a genuinely badass piece of music. [h3][b]Graphics:[/b][/h3] I was actually worried at first the game would strain my eyes because of the 8-bit graphics + how much is going on on screen. The secret to playing this game is to play it in windowed mode IMO. Helped immensely. Environment design is top notch with visually distinct biomes that all look great top to bottom, and the pixel art from the character sprites to the portraits to the tiny details are all gorgeous, and are proof you can make something "retro" without it having to look lazy or hideous. I'm throwing shade at a certain popular """"retro style"""" game there, but I won't name names. [h2]What I [b]DIDN'T[/b] like:[/h2] [h3][b]Combat:[/b][/h3] I absolutely hated the combat in this game. I went in hoping for a top-down Zelda like Link to the Past or something of the sort and I got TEMU Bloodborne/Souls, except in Souls games I could dodge roll and block/parry and had 360 degrees of movement and attacking. Mina swings in the 4 cardinal directions while enemies can attack you from literally anywhere, are insanely fast while she's insanely slow, and she has next to no tools in her base kit to really help with any of it. Burrowing (your "dodge" so to speak) is awkward as it has an insane delay I could not get used to in 26 hours of play and some stuff can still hit you underground anyway. This is on top of enemies also doing contact damage, something else that doesn't exist in Souls. Healing has Bloodborne's blood vial system (kind of) but just worse because of the previously mentioned compounding issues. [h3][b]Platforming:[/b][/h3] Platforming in a top down game sucks. It's never good. It's not very good here. The controls, especially the burrow which is also a platforming tool, are not snappy enough for the pixel perfect platforming this game demands of you at times, Most of it is passable at best but some sections like inside the monster in Bone Beach and auto-scrolling sections are completely egregious and I feel like it's almost mandatory to always have the Spike Shield sidearm on you at all times just to mitigate some of the awful platforming sections. Also, whoever decided you should get reset all the way to the very start of the screen whenever you get knocked into a pit by the multiple enemies/hazards/projectiles on screen you need to avoid while also jumping through metaphorical hoops just to get across a platform should probably never work in video games again. [h3][b]Difficulty Curve:[/b][/h3] The game starts off insanely punishing and since you have no direction on where to really go you'll wind up in areas you really shouldn't be in yet at times. I'm not quite sure why they made the game so open ended when there's clearly an intended order to complete Generators considering how strong enemies can get. Mid-game you'll be facetanking everything including bosses with enough level ups and upgrades to your cloak. Then the very endgame just goes to back to being annoying. Also corpse runs in the year 2026 when even FromSoft and other Souls imitators have been doing away with it for years now is just plain stupid. There's nothing interesting about doing runbacks 5 or 6 screens away just to try again. Again, it's just annoying for the sake of being annoying. ---- I think that's really how I sum up my time with the game: annoying. I didn't feel challenged, not in a meaningful way anyway. Everything felt designed to be as deliberately annoying, tedious, and punishing as possible. Stuff like Ninja Gaiden on the NES or whatever "Nintendo Hard" example we all grew up with was cute back in the 80s and 90s. I expect a game released in 2026 to feel like a game designed in 2026. Not 1970. I don't care how "retro" you're trying to be, making the game deliberately annoying when we've had over 50 years of game design to look back on isn't cute. It's dumb. Before anyone brings it up yes I'm aware of the modifiers. No I didn't use them (they disable achievements as well which is going to turn off plenty of people from ever touching them). Though they do beg the question of what the game would have looked like and been balanced like without them. I don't like modifiers like this. There's a very fine line between genuine accessibility options (colorblind modes, button binding for genuinely disabled people, etc) and "just make me invincible"/"double the amount of checkpoints" etc. The latter shouldn't exist. And their existence means something was stripped from the game during the design process ("we don't need to really balance this they can just use a modifier if they're having trouble") in order to have it there. They're band-aids meant to cover up questionable design. The modifiers that make the game harder however I'm all for including especially for people who want to curate some kind of challenge run. I wish Steam had an option inbetween Yes/No for recommendations. I'm completely middle of the pack. Obviously I played and beat the game, so it engaged me enough to sink 26 hours into it and see it through and then write a review, but at the same time I don't think those 26 hours were particularly fun. Again, I went in wanting top-down Zelda and I got a very mediocre interpretation on Soulslikes. I'd rather just go play Dark Souls 3 again if you're gonna ask me to play a Soulslike. So many of these indie devs, Western indie devs especially, don't seem to understand what even makes Souls good. Here's a hint, there's a lot more nuance than "make the game hard" and then interpret the word 'hard' as "make this as annoying and tedious as possible"-- So I guess I'll say No, I don't recommend the game. Which sucks, cus I really wanted to love it. I even ordered merch despite my feelings towards it. If there ever is a sequel (and hopefully not with another 7 year wait, I'll be dead by then--) I'd hope they lean more into making it more like a 2D Zelda and less of this "DARK SOULS WAS GOOD BECAUSE IT WAS HARD RIGHT????" infestation that seems to plague the indie space.

To anyone seeing negative reviews saying it's too hard - keep in mind the game has options to customize your experience. People refuse to make use of those and somehow that's the game's fault. Imagine playing Zelda and refusing to pick up heart containers. Playing Super Metroid and refusing to pick up the Varia Suit (heat protection), then complaining the level with high heat is too hard. That's how a lot of people are approaching this game and yeah no wonder they're stressed out. Go figure. Adjusting the difficulty isn't cheating. Don't tell yourself any different, because that's pretty damn silly. If you do refuse to adjust the difficulty with the provided options, at least own your decision. Can't blame the game for your personal choices. Saying there's no cookies when the cookies are right in front of you. Anyway, just wanted to fight back against some of the stupid reviews out there. If you enjoyed Zelda, Hollow Knight, and enjoy chip tunes, here you go. Pretty dang good combination that I hope we'll see more of. The game does a good job challenging old expectations. If you just want a linear metroidvania type sequenced experience, the open-world side of this might rub you the wrong way. But if you like exploring, breaking secret walls, thinking outside the box, here's a good one for that too.

Fantastic love letter to classic Zelda and Castlevania while feeling very much its own thing. Controls are very tight, exploration is fun and rewarding, combat is super fun. Yacht Club Games showed Shovel Knight wasn't just a fluke. One of the all timer indie game experiences.

Really hits the Dark Souls 1 vibes for me. Weird ass characters, jumpscares, and very challenging. Incredible aesthetic, fun characters, and well worth the price.

peak peak peak holy mother of peak NOT like Zelda, though. It's a combat and platforming focused game where puzzles are minimal and mostly relegated to short side-quests. Big focus on character loadout variety and basic RPG mechanics (there's a modifier to disable that for anyone who doesn't like it) so it's much closer to a top-down Dark Souls than anything. You can even customize Mina with the Beastium trinkets to make her hotter. Anyone looking for a recent game that's somewhat closer to Zelda in terms of puzzle focus should consider checking out Pipistrello. Speaking of which, why the HELL did they not make a Mina + Pipistrello bundle? It's the most obvious and ideal choice of bundle for this game but people be sleeping I guess.

[i]What a videogame should and shouldn't be[/i] Mina The Hollower starts very, very rough. The game has no intention of holding your hand at first and on the contrary it immediately throws at you some of the most annoying enemies in the whole game, even overpowered for being in the first area. Chances are the weapon you chose at the start still doesn't click very well and you're struggling understanding some of the mechanics about Mina's movement. Maybe this was the devs intention or maybe the start is just not well balanced but, to put it simply, you must endure and get through it. Mina the Hollower is a testament that top-down 2D platformers have still much, much more to say. The devs created a special game that, albeit a bit slowly, opens up beautifully and shows just how full of surprises it is. - Thanks to 5 weapons to choose from the combat is diversified well enough. You'll feel the need to have a dash or roll at first but this game isn't called The Hollower for nothing, you need to hollow in order to evade and it's a quite original mechanic implemented cleverly, after a bit of practice you'll pass more time underground than not. - Hollowing, as stated above, is well implemented and used in both combat and exploration in many ways. As a mechanic it's a breath of fresh air. - Exploration is the best element of the game, almost every screen in the game has an hidden secret and while some are obvious you'll be surprised to come back later to a screen and see what you have missed. Although the game is very reminiscent of old GB Zelda games it has no puzzles in it, you'll just need good observation and... reading skill to find secrets. - The game has a myriad of... extra things to do. They're not all exactly miniquests but just errands and stuff you'll occasionally find yourself doing. They're blended with the world very naturally, you'll not need to go out of your way and do things like backtracking to complete them. - Trinkets and Side-arms. The game has 60 trinkets and a dozen of side-arms to find. Some of them even change Mina gameplay and they're necessary to find some secrets. They add a nice extra layer of depth to the game, although I wish side-arms would be easier to find and use at all times. Almost only praise for the game so let's address the elephant in the room, at least for me. Although I loved the exploration the game has its fair share of annoyingly designed screens which seem to have been made only to be... surprise surprise, annoying. It's mostly a combination of deadly pits + cheap enemy placement + environment hazard which all work out against you and you don't have much room for error, since the space you can move on is very limited. These screens always felt a bit overturned over the course of the game for me, like it was more a design problem rather than a skill issue on my part. Sometime they even reminded me of Dark Souls 2 infamous enemy placement (I like DS2, do not come in my DMs please), which has always felt unfair to me. This is probably the only weak point in the game for me. Overall, at least until you master the combat and the movement and get enough upgrades, this game at first can be a tough cookie to face and if you're not eager for a challenge maybe consider carefully before buying it. For every other veteran player willingly to put in the effort, this is almost a no brainer, Mina the Hollower will become a classic for most.