Mina the Hollower

Brilliant game. Awesome dungeon design and truly a world that felt worth exploring every corner of. Feels like there's a few secrets on almost every screen, and you're rewarded for finding each one of them. Reminds me of the best of the classic Zeldas, with a few modern tweaks & a bunch of unique mechanics which made moving around just that much more fun. The top-down platforming z-axis stuff you could do in the levels was really cool, if a little jank at times. I can only imagine that implementing that was a nightmare, if mainly for all the edge-cases this game would have to handle in order to make it as smooth as it is. It's not perfect though; there were definitely times when jumps were kind-of unclear, or the perspective was a little weird when fighting certain large enemies, or I got stuck in a wall trying to jump over it with another mechanic. I can definitely see why this hasn't been explored quite so much in other top-down games, mainly from the perspective of it just being a challenge to make work consistently. However, I highly respect them for trying, and hope this paves the way for future top-down games with a real z-axis. - A special note about hitboxes; I felt it was a little strange when large bosses didn't account for perspective with them, when many level-objects did. - I also think that mina's hitbox sometimes felt a little unfair, particularly when getting squished. There were definitely times when I thought I was in a safe-spot but I guess I got the corners of mina's hitbox barely pinched between two closing walls, or she barely clipped a boss I thought I had spaced out properly. The trinkets felt like a great way to expand your player & help you solve problems in certain areas. I seriously think that there's a trinket for any situation you might come across, and its a lot of fun once you get to start combining them. This game does suffer from a pretty steep difficulty curve at the start, which eases off a lot mid-game as you get more trinket slots & other upgrades & can have a more expressive build. This is somewhat typical of games in the "metroid-vania" genre, but it was definitely something I particularly observed here. A handful of other things did take getting used-to; I found that at times the heal & the burrow felt particularly slow during combat. Finding an opening was sometimes pretty challenging. However, once I got some good trinkets & sidearms going I did find I was able to strategize using plasma vials around manipulating the bosses by using them (particularly, the teleporty-disk one I don't remember the name of rn). Their modifiers / assist mode is very interesting too. I didn't engage with it on my first playthrough, but I can see it being helpful for those who need it. I did find myself thinking "man, I wish the burrow was just a *little* faster" a lot, which I think is the main use-case of this game's assist system. Cool of the developers to enable that; reminds me of cheat-codes in other games too. Also, this game has an excellent spin on the souls-like death mechanic. It honestly feels more like a life-system flavored as the souls-like death. By allowing you to use your bones until you die without your sparks; what you basically end up with is an anti-hoarding system, rather than a punishing "oops you died to tha boss now all your bones are gone forever, too bad you couldn't get them back if you tried." Since you can always use your bones until you die without your spark, you may think "oh shoot I gotta go spend these now otherwise I might lose them, maybe there's an item that will help me with this boss" which I think is a much more fun and engaging dynamic. Overall, I think this game is a 9/10 for me. It's everything I wanted and then some. Docking a point mainly because of the weirdness with the platforming at times. But this game is absolutely worth checking out if you're into this genre.

REALLY good game

Zeldavania!

难度刚好，探索深度不错，手感也棒，唯一的缺点就是像素有点大看起来容易眼花，尤其是看字幕的时候

Muy divertido

emmm无论是打击感、音乐、前期怪物强度还是画面整体表现以及解锁捷径的推图过程，我都认为很不错，但是但是，它能不能给主线或者说你要进行的任务，加一丁丁儿引导？我第一次卡关是在序章需要钥匙的地方，我在那里反复转了十来分钟，然后搜索攻略才发现，TM那个打击后地图上留下来的一条小缝是要钻进去的！！！！我说好的我知道了，还是在序章第一次有箭头拦路，我又是撞墙撞了半天来查攻略，TM那个像是房檐处的一个凹形又是能挖进去的，我挖NM我挖。序章过了我淌火往下走，叛军大营里救了个NPC一直给你丢回复，但是路呢？我把看得见的按钮都踩了，自己往两边门跳那NPC都说，哎呀你要丢下我吗？我丢你老母！把骨片存着回去也不行.......总之不推荐。

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