Mina the Hollower

really struggle to come up with much to say about this one that hasn't already been said already; both good and bad. out with the good; the spritework is impeccable and I love the gbc aesthetic. the music's also probably the best in an indie release since the the original shovel knight and its extra campaigns and it's clear jake kaufman's talent hasn't waned in the slightest. gives toby fox a run for his money honestly. nox's bayou into septemburg into bone beach is probably the game as a whole at its best and is where the platforming, combat and exploration felt the most harmonious but my enjoyment unfortunately did not last as i will get into. i liked the final boss at least so I can at least say I finished it on a positive note as well. i typically like challenging games but much of this game's "challenge" only seems to come from its seemingly purposefully infuriating approach to level and enemy encounter design in the first and last thirds of the game in a way that feels distinctly soulslike (derogatory) as opposed to the top-down zelda it was advertising itself as. at its peak mina the hollower's flowstate is unmatched even by nintendo's 2d zelda offerings (the middle third of the game i previously mentioned) but at its worst - which is approximately 60% of the time - it's kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miserable and i wish i was just playing link's awakening or hell even the oracle games instead. lots of flying enemies with erratic movement and attack patterns in a game whose combat and tools made available intentionally lack the capacity to effectively deal with hazards perpendicular to you (save for one very easily missable weapon upgrade which I only got to use for the final boss as i found it in my 100% completion cleanup). it's not necessarily Difficult, and death isn't very punishing after the first dungeon considering how easy it becomes to get back to your darksouls bloodstain analogue (largely by virtue of simply being granted more attempts to do so) before your Souls (they're bones in this game) are lost forever. at least i can thank yacht club games for making the mechanic less annoying than it usually is. I can't imagine it being intentional (though it is something dark souls is similarly characterised by) but the number of times i felt caught off guard by something i simply couldn't have anticipated or by lingering, wonky hitboxes had me feeling that very few of my deaths or instances of having been stunlocked to near death were actually my fault. the map is deceptively open-ended in that the game is actually kind of linear with an easily perceivable intended dungeon order and going off the beaten path has you quickly running into enemies that kill you in one or two hits. this is only compounded by the fact that there are very few (if any, depending on whether you even count them as such) upgrades that facilitate exploration or progression in the same way your typical zelda or metroid would. most of your trinkets and subweapons instead serve to enhance your combat capabilities, and then there's a few that give you something like a midair dash or extra movement speed which immediately emerge as the best option to keep on you at all times. you can get the drill early and i stuck with it the entire game. you should too. sometimes the game expects you to have a specific subweapon or subweapon/trinket combo to access a secret or visible collectible but more often than not, what you need is nowhere in sight. just feels like an incredibly odd design choice to Not make subweapons permanent upgrades that can be cycled between on the fly and instead evoke something reminiscent of Donkey Kong 64's character switching. sometimes this means going halfway across the map to throw away your drill for the fishing rod, or something else with infinitely less broad usefulness - only to come back and be rewarded to what amounts as, as is typical of most indie games that draw from dark souls nowadays: Souls. ever so rarely you'll get a trinket, and rarer still will it be of any use to you. all the health and pouch upgrades are just made available to you in the shop in ossex at the start of the game anyway and most of the time the trinkets you get feel like they exists only to fill a specific niche or get One specific collectible, though i'll concede it doesn't reach hollow knight levels of sidegrades and a lot of stuff *technically* has uses but is ultimately just suboptimal. maybe i wouldn't have had these issues if I found the battery buster sooner. as someone who loves shovelknight (specter of torment of especially) and finds themself both disillusioned by the state of zelda as a franchise and how dark souls has seeped its way into a lot of modern game design, i can't help but feel disappointed. maybe i should've tempered my expectations when they came out with that twitter promo talking about the game modifiers. shovel knight had them too but they felt far more like a silly gimmick as opposed to an accessibility toggle. didn't need to use them but maybe the people complaining about a potential lack of well-tuned difficulty were onto something. i'd still recommend this because it still manages to blow silksong out of the water lol