Mina the Hollower

Call me Mina the way I be Hollowing out my cheeks under the desk at Yacht Club Games for creating this masterpiece. Post review

I love this game a lot! Its probably an evergreen. Im after my first playthrough working through new game plus and the randomizer at once and im having a blast still (only thing abt the randomizer is that its kindof sad there isnt a key system that forces you to do areas in a certain order). But im having amazing fun, i didnt care that much about shovel knight, even though it played well, but this one is a stay for me on my steamdeck

Does the gameboy style very well. I also love how open the world is, you can go straight to the more difficult areas (I went straight to Septemburg, Crow Town in particular is brutal) and I really do enjoy the challenge. This game is not easy which is a good thing. As a fan of old school 2D Zelda such as Link's Awakening and The Oracle Games I am having fun.

I wanted to get a little distance between finishing my playthrough and writing a review, simply because I had such strongly mixed feelings about the game. It’s hard to know quite where to come down when there is a level of impressively thoughtful craftmanship here which absolutely has to be applauded, and which succeeds in delivering elements which made the game hugely compelling to me – yet at the same time, a core tenet of the design ethos seems to have been to repeatedly ask the question “and how can we screw the player now?”, resulting in some of the most exasperating gameplay in recent memory. There are sections of the game which I had to force myself through with gritted teeth, utterly hating every minute of it – despite which, I still wanted to keep going… Obviously, I am conflicted. I’m old enough to have been around for the generation of platformers which Mina takes heavy inspiration from – and I can’t deny, the level and enemy designs specifically crafted with the intent of smacking the player with countless cheap, infuriating deaths absolutely ring true. I was not aware anyone held any warm, fuzzy memories for those days where play time was routinely inflated with that particular flavour of anti-fun padding, but evidently so. In addition, there’s a number of more recent salt-in-the-wounds trends, such as the drawn-out, interruptible healing, and the always delightful corpse runs. In addition, dying strips you of your sidearms and “joules” (ammo), virtually guaranteeing that the fight you already failed at is now going to be considerably harder. Beyond that, every enemy also causes contact damage, with knockback (typically into a carefully positioned pit), and worse still, there is no dodge move, the closest to which you have is simply burrowing. However, that requires you to jump up and hang completely vulnerable in the air for a second or two before diving underground, effectively meaning you need to act well before an attack happens (and which, even if perfectly timed, does not actually protect you against damage in quite a few cases). Outside of burrowing, your movement is painfully slow, and your attacks are limited to the 4 cardinal directions – a restriction not imposed on your enemies, giving them vastly unbalanced flexibility to attack you while avoiding your attacks, and which also serves to make the combat feel clunky and simplistic. In short, there are multiple highly questionable decisions related to combat, and I found little-to-no enjoyment from that major gameplay element. I’m sure the rough-edged design was in part considered justified because of the considerable number of upgrades and trinkets that you acquire as you play, and it is true that I was extremely glad to find synergies in my accumulated collection to mitigate some of these aspects to an extent. That said, for me they came closer to making the combat acceptable rather than enjoyable, and this structure also results in the rather odd-feeling dynamic that playing through the early stages of the game proves to be much more punishing than the later ones. A second mitigating factor here, arguably, is that there are many opportunities to efficiently grind for “bones”, the currency used for upgrades, so to level up only requires patient persistence. That said, grinding isn’t much fun at the best of times, let alone when you don’t find the combat enjoyable, so it hardly earns a gold star just for managing that much, and even when upgraded to the max, it makes minimal difference to how combat feels. I said at the beginning of the review that my feelings were mixed, but this has been pretty damn negative up until this point. So, where are the positives to be found? Well, basically… *everything else*. The music and sound design are great, the pixel art is wonderful, and the storytelling and characterisation is hugely enjoyable. The way that secrets are incorporated, including how the world design loops around on itself to unlock shortcuts, is ingenious and satisfying, and the different regions of the map are diverse and feel really well fleshed out. All of this amounts to a delectable atmosphere and vibe, and exploration that is compelling. Along with that, I also found many of the platforming challenges to be fun – the exceptions being when the previously mentioned infuriating enemy and combat design get in the way, which can quickly turn them into a chore. Overall, the game feels so rich with carefully considered details, and a great many of them feel clever and inventive to me, so I can understand why many players absolutely adore it. But if the combat doesn’t land with you – as it resolutely did not with me – it is such a huge barrier to really appreciating all those other ingredients, however superb they may be. It’s great that games like this are being made, and I’m glad that I was able to play it, but it’s an enormous shame that this feels so close to being a stone-cold masterpiece, yet the antagonistic design choices leave it as something I can only hesitantly recommend with a pile of hefty caveats.

喜欢喜欢喜欢喜欢喜欢喜欢喜欢喜欢喜欢 以前玩过Prodigal，也是这种画风复古的类赛，不过米娜的机制要丰富一些。多样的饰品，武器和副武器，丰富的地图色彩，以及可爱的小老鼠米娜，都非常好啊哈哈哈哈✧٩(ˊωˋ*)و✧。 上手难度和战斗难度来说都不算难，探索收集的过程也很有意思，地图之间也是互通的。就是故事结局米娜被赶出城了，有点悲伤😞 总的来说就是推荐推荐推荐((*^∀^))👍🏻

I really didn't think much of this game at first to be honest, but now playing it I really like how much it has to offer and how much variety it has you to explore. I really hope you make more games like this one.

I really loved this game, for the most part the difficulty is pitched just right - both in puzzling out where to go and in the combat. Graphics and sound are both great, the style really complemented the gameplay well. Boss fights were challenging without becoming unfair, there were only a couple that really tripped me up along the way.