It's so good.
I admit, I'd come to this gamw from a strange place as I'd grown tired of most video games. There was a dearth of variety from the late '80s to the early '00s—the golden era of video games—that I miss. The landscape now is "An open-world action-adventure with a bad understanding of RPG elements, a fetish for number go up, and an obsession with gacha RNG, where a human wanders around and murders everything!" Sometimes with affixes like -Souslike, -Roguelike, or both.
This verisimilitude has even ruined indies. It's an affliction. So when I'm on the hunt for a new game? I'm looking for something unusual. I don't mind if a game plumbs the genre graveyard—in this case, that of tile-based, first-person SSI D&D dungeon crawlers—so long as something is done with it. And that something shouldn't be the bloody creatively bankrupt melange of affixes we slog through now. No -Soulslike, thank you! You can stuff your -Roguelike where the sun doesn't shine!
This is the plague of rot that's made modern gaming so unwell. It ruined Mina the Hollower for me. It could've been an excellent game, but it's actually painfully generic and staid beneath its -Soulslike and -Roguelike affixes. I won't deny that it has a beautiful aesthetic, but the passion just isn't there. It wasn't their goal to be interesting, rather it was to utilise existing gamedev tropes in a polished, workmanlike way.
Why am I talking about Mina so much in a review of thia game? It's a necessary preface. It's something I think about a lot. I think it's a very neurotypical desire to want to play exactly the same game, over-and-over, without variation. The assumption ia that neurodivergence likes repetittion, a point that I'm thankful to modern science for dispelling. In fact, traditional dopaminergic systems value repetition so much more. I was always confused about that, but it was more a of a warped observation regarding the depth of a special interest. If one can't understand the incredible variety in the depth of it, it must seem repetitive. "All they do is look at sharks all day, how repetitive!" Look. Let me tell you about sharks. A man namrd Dr. Fish made a better underwater turbine by carefully analysing the nature of shark scales. No, I'm not making that up. And my special interest isn't even sharks. I just get depth.
Two of my special interests are psychology and game design. I've noticed that neurotypicals will mirror their own nature onto that which they don't understand. This is how the nonsense hypothesis of the alpha wolf came about—neurotypicals love hierarchy and obeying big, dumb, aggressive people. This was projected onto wolves, but actually the wolves were just trying to escape from a wolf psychopath. Any neurodivergent could've told them that. But again, neurotypicals observe less and project more, it's their nature. Why is any of this relevant? Gimme a minute!
What a neurotypical wants is more repetition, but further refined. Greater spectacle, more gore, the resomolutions of the lumenites! "Fidelity! Fidelity! Fidelity!" is their Ballmer-esque cant/chant. And so, we get the resomolutions, and they'd likely be out buying fancy new 8090s about now if it weren't for the AI boom putting a kibosh on that. Even now, they want a new Xbox, a new PlayStation, just to eke out a dripfeed of increased fidelity, unwilling to admit we've.hit that ceiling already.
This, of course, fails to acknowledge two important points. And those are that: 1.) neurodivergent people exist; and 2.) neurodivergent children exist.
Sure, sit a neurotypical kid in front of Fortnite or Call of Duty and you're fine. But that doesn't necessarily hold true for a neurodivergent kid. To the contrary, I'd say they'll feel bored. I have noticed, in trawling the Internet, that youngling neurodivergents—call them Gen Alpha, if you must—are turning their attention to the golden age of gaming. Not out of any obsession for "retro," no, not at all, it's merely because the golden age of games was bizarrely neurodivergent. These weren't games made for people who'd grow up to repetitively strim their lawns, noisily, just for a social dopamine hit.
But sometime around late '05-ish, the seventh generation... I think it was? The 360 and PS3? Was that the seventh? It seems a bit arbitrary so I can never be certain. Anyway, around then, there was a shift to a neurotypical audoence of adults and things haven't really changed much since. Oh, sure, resomolutions, gore, and spectacle, but the underlying experiences have barely changed at all. It was that era that set the rulebook for modern gamedev. I mean, do recall that it was 2006 that wrote the future of microtransactions with horse armour in Oblivion.
These days I find I'll voraciously leap upon aught that isn't described as "open-world," or "action-adventure!" Aught that eschews the treasonous (you heard me—well, read me) suffixes of -Soulslike and -Roguelike. As I said, a special interest I have is that of game design, but I'd temper the descriptor by adding that only genuinely interesting games catch my eye enough to warrant a deep-dive. I like thoughtfully designed games, where someone came to the table woth genuine passion about an idea they'd had. A Kobold Story is one of these.
It takes the aforementioned SSI dungeon crawler and retrofits it for neurodivergent youths. Which is also appealing to neurodivergent mes. The thing is? I can see neurodivergent kids finding this—and they will—and being utterly delighted by it. No one makes SSI-style dungeon crawlers anymore. I think the last decent one was Grimrock 2? Anyway, the uniquely fun presentation and the ability to customise so, so much about the difficulty will make this an accessible game that neurodivergent children will love—and one they can come back to aa they grow, tweaking that difficulty.
In this way? It'll be a game that the neurodivergent kids who play it will remember. It'll be a cornerstone of their gaming story. And I think that that's a massive win. And as I said, since it isn't a game that obsesses over the stereotypical gamedev tropes? It's a grand old time for neurodivergent me, too.
As a further note that applies to myself and other neurodivergents who've been in (or worse, are in) the situations I've been in? Abuse trauma means that witnessing a human beating a creature into a bloody pulp is likely to play on deep-seated horrors. I'm more likely to relate to that which is getting beaten to said pulp, I'm likely to see the human as a monster. Another point regarding those games of yore is the lack of sensationalist gore. Sorry, unintentional rhyme. So... the lack of humans beating critters to a bloody pulp is a net gain for any neurodivergent who's had that done to them. Empathy is valued.
I mean, neurodivergent kids relate more strongly to non-human characters anyway, but... it's always a positive when a game features non-human protagonists in a bloodless game for a whole host of reasons. So this, again, is another massive win.
Others will mention that the art is adorable (which it is), that the game is interesting (which it sincerely is), and/or that kobolds are rad (which they are, I just freakin' love kobolds), but... I felt the need to go a bit more in-depth about why this one's a winner.
If you have a neurodivergent child, do try the demo with them.
