Mina the Hollower review: goes beyond a Game Boy Color Zelda homage

After setting the bar for retro-inspired games with Shovel Knight 12 years ago, there's been a lot of anticipation on whether Yacht Club Games can follow up on this success, as it moves from NES-inspired 2D platforming to Game Boy Colour-inspired top-down Zelda-like with Mina the Hollower. But just like the indie studio's previous game wasn't just a mere 8-bit pastiche, there's far more depth to this top-down adventure than a tribute to Link's Awakening DX.

The gothic aesthetic no doubt brings to mind Castlevania, with Mina, inventor and mouse, starting off with weapons that instantly evoke Simon Belmont's iconic whip and throwing axe. Called to Tenebrous Isles to restore power to the island's Spark Generators she had invented, there's a richness to this world's colours while staying faithful. Think the cutscenes that bookended Link's Awakening, but much more substantial, regularly appearing when you reach a new part of the map, along with a subtle camera pan as the cherry on top.

Yet it's not slavishly emulating GBC titles. Indeed, despite the 2D aesthetic, Yacht Club Games revealed a few years ago that Mina the Hollower actually runs on the studio's own custom 3D engine, so there are more modern sensibilities than meet the eye. Getting into its hardcore combat, it actually feels like Bloodborne, and to an extent Hollow Knight, where attacking enemies is a means of being able to heal. There's, of course, also a Soulslike mechanic (also employed in Shovel Knight) where death means having to return to where you fell in order to retrieve your dropped currency for levelling up or buying upgrades and items, or else lose forever.

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Not that Hollower

By the way, the 'Hollower' part of the title isn't related to Team Cherry's indie masterpiece, Hollow Knight: Silksong, but rather the guild that Mina belongs to as well as her 'hollowing' ability, where she can burrow underground, which is key for traversal, uncovering items, solving puzzles and even during combat.

However, Mina's combat also feels more punishing than the aforementioned influences. For example, in Bloodborne, if an enemy hits you, you have a brief window to attack and regain some of that lost health. Here, this merely fills your health with plasma, which then requires consuming a vial - with a lengthy animation - in order to actually heal. These vials are also in limited supply, so it's not even like Hollow Knight, where attacking refills your ability to heal. Add to the fact that falling into a pit will also take a not-insignificant portion of health, and you may find combat more difficult, while your attacks are also limited to the rigidity of just four directions.

Where the difficulty in Mina the Hollower is mitigated is that, pretty much from the get-go, you have the ability to apply modifiers in an extremely comprehensive way, be it reducing damage, making plasma count as healing, or even cheats like being able to run or jump further, or hollowing underground permanently. While that is extremely welcome, I do also wish that the default difficulty was better balanced, not least because using these modifiers disables unlocking any achievements for that playthrough.

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A little bit of Zelda

What the modifiers won't necessarily help with is getting you around Tenebrous Isle. This isn't Zelda where the overworld is gated by item progression (though there is a kind of natural order based on difficulty), and instead, once you've reached a specific area you'll encounter environmental mechanics bespoke to that area, such as traversing inside a gigantic serpentine monster in Bone Beach or when things lean more horror when you're being pursued by a mysterious terror in Septemburg. But reaching those areas is half the challenge because I swear I spent a good portion of my playthrough just completely confused with the level layout, running around in circles, or having an idea of where to go next, only to discover the path is blocked until you can figure out what detour to take that will eventually lead you back to unlock the shortcut.

You have to hand it to Yacht Club for not just funnelling you through its world that's meant to be more free-form, even comparable to Breath of the Wild's non-linear design way, or doing the equivalent of yellow paint. Part of this is intentional so that you have that eureka moment of, 'aha, I can interact with this!' or 'oh, this mechanic can work like this too!', but also when you've gone around in circles for a good part of an hour, some kind of visual hint can go a long way, especially if you're having to stop in a middle of a session only to restart and completely forgotten where you are. After all, if Link's Awakening could give you a map from the start, why not here too?

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