Mina the Hollower

There are some games where I can immediately tell I’m going to have a great time, and there are others where I can recognize that I’m playing something exceptionally well made without ever quite falling in love with it. Mina the Hollower is firmly in the second category.

I’ve been aware of Mina the Hollower for years, going all the way back to its early reveals, and it has been one of those indie games that seemed almost destined to succeed. Yacht Club Games had already built a tremendous reputation with Shovel Knight, and Mina immediately looked like another love letter to the games that inspired the studio. Its old-school presentation, top-down action-adventure design, and Game Boy Advance-era aesthetic made it incredibly easy to understand the appeal.

By the time I finally sat down with it, the game had already developed a reputation for being one of the year’s standout indie releases. I had seen the extremely positive reception, but I intentionally avoided reading too much about the game before playing it. I wanted to experience Mina the Hollower for myself and figure out what all the excitement was about.

After spending considerable time with it, I understand the hype. I just don’t necessarily share it.

A World Built Around Mina’s Abilities

The story follows Mina as she is called upon to investigate a crisis involving the Spark generators that helped bring prosperity to the city of Osex. Ten years after her invention helped transform the region, the lights begin to fail and strange things start happening to the landscape.

Baron Lionel summons Mina because both her knowledge of the Spark generators and her abilities as a Hollower could be essential to uncovering what is really happening.

There is clearly a larger mystery being built around these events, and characters like Lionel carry an intentionally ominous presence that made me curious about where the story was going.

The problem is that I never became particularly attached to Mina or her personal journey.

I was much more interested in overcoming the next obstacle, figuring out a difficult encounter, or seeing what was waiting around the next corner than I was in finding out what happened to Mina or the people around her. The story isn’t necessarily bad; it simply never became the reason I wanted to keep playing.

In fact, I think that’s an important distinction for this review. I wasn’t continuing because I was emotionally invested in the narrative. I was continuing because I wanted to see if I could overcome the game itself.

One of the first things that struck me about Mina the Hollower is how carefully constructed almost everything feels. Within the first hour, I was already noticing how much intention seemed to be behind the game’s design. The jumping feels precise, the combat has weight, and the environments constantly give you something to interact with or think about.

The game’s defining mechanic is Mina’s ability to burrow underground. At first, it seems like a clever alternative to the traditional double jump or dodge roll that you see in so many action games, but Yacht Club Games builds much of the adventure around it. Mina can disappear underground to avoid attacks, travel beneath obstacles, reach areas she otherwise couldn’t access, and interact with objects from below.

That last part is particularly fun. I could burrow underneath a large boulder, grab it from below, pull it out of the ground, and throw it at an enemy. In another situation, a barrier that would have normally stopped me from progressing could simply be bypassed by digging underneath it. These moments helped establish early on that Mina wasn’t simply borrowing an old-school aesthetic. It was actually trying to build its own gameplay identity around its central mechanic.

The game also does a good job of making the environment part of the combat. Arrows and other projectiles aren’t always hazards that you simply have to avoid. If an arrow is flying toward Mina, I can time a melee attack and redirect it back toward where it came from or send it toward an enemy. Those little interactions made the world feel more deliberate and gave the combat an extra layer beyond simply attacking whatever was standing in front of me.

There is a real sense of craftsmanship here. Even when I wasn’t enjoying myself, I could usually understand why a particular system existed and what Yacht Club Games was trying to accomplish with it.

Combat Has Weight, but It Doesn’t Always Work for Me

Mina the Hollower gives you several different weapons that dramatically change how Mina approaches combat. The Whisper and Vesper daggers emphasize speed, the Nightstar gives you a longer-range melee option with its chained mace, and the Blaststrike Maul is a much slower weapon built around heavier attacks and explosive force.

I spent most of my early time with the Nightstar because it offered a nice middle ground. The daggers are noticeably faster, while the hammer hits considerably harder but requires more patience. Being able to experiment with those weapons early on gives you an immediate understanding that your preferred weapon can shape the way you approach encounters.

The combat itself feels good. Attacks have a satisfying amount of weight behind them, and enemies don’t feel like they’re simply absorbing damage until their health bars disappear. Dodging, burrowing underneath attacks, and waiting for the right opportunity to strike gives the combat a rhythm that I appreciated.

Where I started running into problems was with the game’s directional combat. Mina’s attacks are essentially limited to the four primary directions, while enemies can approach from considerably more angles. There were moments when enemies were attacking me from diagonals and different elevations while I felt restricted by the directions available to my own attacks.

That imbalance became increasingly noticeable as I progressed. The game is asking me to carefully position myself and pay attention to enemy attacks, but there were times when I felt like the limitations of Mina’s attack directions were working against me rather than encouraging better play.

The same thing happened with some environmental hazards. Getting knocked backward by an enemy and subsequently falling into a pit or taking damage from another hazard can feel less like a mistake I made and more like the game stacking punishment on top of punishment. Those moments were particularly frustrating because they took away from what is otherwise a very deliberate combat system.

The Souls Influence Is Where We Part Ways

This is probably the biggest dividing line between Mina the Hollower and me.

There are clear Souls-inspired elements throughout the game, and one of the most obvious is what happens when Mina dies. You lose the Spark you’ve accumulated, and you have to return to the location of your death to recover it. If you die again before getting there, that currency is gone.

I have never particularly enjoyed this mechanic in Souls games, and seeing it appear here immediately put me at odds with one of the game’s central progression systems. Losing currency isn’t inherently difficult to understand, but it adds a layer of anxiety to exploration that I simply don’t enjoy.

That frustration becomes even more pronounced because of the game’s approach to navigation. Mina the Hollower doesn’t really want to hold your hand. It expects you to explore, remember where you’ve been, and figure out where you should go next. For players who enjoy that kind of discovery, I can absolutely see the appeal. For me, it became one of the game’s biggest problems.

I like having objectives. I like knowing where I’m supposed to go and having a map that helps me understand the world I’m exploring. Mina takes the opposite approach, and because recovering your lost Spark requires you to remember where you died, the lack of strong navigation tools became more than a minor inconvenience.

There is a map of sorts available, but it never gave me the level of information I wanted from it. I frequently found myself wandering around trying to remember where I had been and where I was supposed to go next. Instead of making me feel like an adventurous explorer, it often made me feel like I was wasting time.

That is an important distinction because I don’t think the game’s approach is poorly designed. It simply isn’t designed around the way I like to play.

An Interesting Take on Health and Progression

Mina the Hollower has several systems that I found genuinely clever, even when I wasn’t necessarily enjoying them.

Healing is a good example. Mina has health vials, but using one doesn’t simply restore a predetermined amount of health. Instead, attacking enemies builds up your potential health recovery. That means you have to decide when the best time to heal actually is. You can use a vial immediately to get yourself out of danger, or you can continue fighting and build up a larger amount of potential healing before committing to it.

It’s an interesting risk-and-reward system because it makes healing an active decision rather than something you simply do whenever your health gets low.

Unfortunately, the execution didn’t always work for me. Mina’s healing animation takes long enough that I could find myself vulnerable while trying to recover, which became especially frustrating during difficult encounters. The game does offer modifiers that can change this behavior, but using modifiers also disables the game’s Feats for that profile.

That created an odd situation where the game gives you considerable freedom to tailor the experience, but I still found myself questioning whether I was actually playing the experience the developers intended.

Character progression is similarly flexible. Bones can be used to improve Mina’s attack, defense, and sidearms, with each subsequent upgrade requiring more currency. Weapons can also be purchased and upgraded, giving you multiple ways to strengthen Mina throughout the adventure.

I generally like having meaningful choices about how my character develops, and Mina gives you plenty of them.

The Sidearms Are Creative, Even When I Wanted More Control

The sidearms are another example of something I appreciated more in concept than in execution.

There is a great variety here. Mina can use a heavy axe, a throwable dagger, an umbrella that can block attacks and then be thrown, a boomerang-like disc, and even a small creature that follows her around. The variety keeps the combat from feeling completely static, and some of these tools can completely change how you approach an encounter.

My issue is that sidearms aren’t simply permanent abilities that I can unlock and freely swap between. Instead, I’m encouraged to find them throughout the world and work with whatever I’ve discovered.

Again, that’s a design choice rather than an objective flaw. Yacht Club Games clearly had a particular vision for how these tools should function, and it follows that vision consistently. I just would have preferred a system where finding a new sidearm unlocked it permanently and allowed me to switch between my favorites whenever I wanted.

The game also ties these abilities to a resource pool, although modifiers allow you to change that behavior. It’s another system where I could see the thought behind the design while still finding myself wishing it worked differently.

That became the recurring theme of my time with Mina the Hollower: I could see the quality behind almost every decision, but I kept finding myself wishing those decisions had been made for a player with my particular tastes.

Exploration Rewards Curiosity

Despite my issues with navigation, I do enjoy exploring Mina the Hollower when the game gives me something interesting to find.

There are secrets tucked away throughout its environments, along with different dungeon-like paths that present their own challenges. These areas often feel like miniature tests that ask you to figure out how to navigate hazards, enemies, and environmental puzzles.

The game also has a wide variety of enemies and environmental threats. Sludge creatures, flying enemies, enemies perched on elevated platforms, spikes, pits, traps, and projectiles all combine to make the environments feel dangerous.

That variety matters because the game rarely lets you completely switch your brain off. There is usually something you need to account for, whether it’s an enemy’s movement pattern or the environment itself.

I just wish the game did a better job of helping me understand where all of this exploration was taking me.

The Bosses Are the Showstoppers

If there is one part of Mina the Hollower that consistently impressed me, it is the bosses.

The bosses are visually enormous, detailed, and full of personality. Even early in the game, encounters like the Kraken immediately communicate that Yacht Club Games understands how to make a boss feel like an event rather than simply another enemy with a larger health bar.

More importantly, the bosses have distinct movesets and require you to actually engage with what they’re doing. I wasn’t simply memorizing one attack pattern and waiting for an opening. I had to use Mina’s abilities, pay attention to positioning, dodge attacks, and find opportunities to strike.

The difficulty also felt considerably more approachable to me than a traditional Souls game. Mina can be challenging, but it rarely felt like it was trying to beat me into submission. That distinction mattered because I have never been particularly drawn to Souls games, and I was relieved to find that Mina still felt like an action-adventure game first.

The bosses are also where the game’s presentation really shines. Yacht Club Games has created some genuinely memorable designs, and the scale and detail of these encounters make them stand out against the otherwise deliberately retro presentation.