Mina the Hollower

kickass gameplay, sick ass music, beautiful ass art style. you need to play this game Pronto.

The game can be absolutely stellar most of the time, but there's some spots that were supremely frustrating. Overall, some brutal gameplay moments are lost beneath the veneer of absolutely exquisite music, art, depth, options, variance, and most of the gameplay and platforming. This game offers a lot of fantastic things, so you can toss my complaints to personal issues with it if you want; plenty of people have zero issues and love it through and through. Story: Pretty great overall. I actually really like what they've done with many characters, but I feel like character development is pretty weak overall, primary to wider world information. Not even Mina gets very much, and the Hollower's Guild in general gets even less. I feel that the ending might leave a lot of people dissatisfied on this front, even if it's pretty cool, and really not at all what I was expecting lol. You're in for a dark game, though. Despite the upbeat music and colorful, cartoonish world, the story gets progressively darker as you play. This game absolutely demands a sequel for a variety of reasons, but most of all because there's tremendous room for story expansion, and a bit for gameplay improvement (imo). Art, Music, and World: I'm not a fan of 8-bit games (but I don't let my preferences count against anything), but this one really interested me from the early trailers. The presentation of the art and music complemented the burrowing, weapons, and sidearms showcase, and there's a lot of very enjoyable music. No part of the OST grinded on me, and it was all fantastic. A lot of it is just fun to listen and play along to. The game lacks fast travel for the first half, but it integrates it a bit later in some interesting ways. By the time you should really be backtracking for collectibles, you should have a pretty wide kit to make traversing the other bits a lot easier in tandem with them. There's a lot of secrets and things to collect, and plenty you can miss in your first pass. There's trackers and helpers for getting what you miss later in the game. There is, however, a single perma-missable in Septemberg with the children during the boss chase there. So beware of that. The zones are all varied in visuals, enemies, challenges, and style. Nothing ever feels same-y, which is great! Enemy and boss variety was fantastic. In fact, some of the progression and events in the game are completely unpredictable, and break the typical linear sequence. Randomly encountering events, or even bosses of the main story in unusual places, and subverting your expectations with what might be next and when was without a doubt one of the most enjoyable things about this. It wasn't the usual, "Go here, do this, and then this will happen," over and over. Superb design. The characters are pretty cute or cartoonish, though you don't often see a blend of humans and furries in a world. I don't know why, but I especially liked the adorable possum in the courtyard. Combat and Platforming: This is where the game will range from, "This is really great!" to "This is frustrating." Mina is somewhat slow in the grand scheme, and built on 4-directional movement and combat with a limited arc. The rest of the game? Not always so. Mina can also have a dead zone, and barely any iFrames on taking damage. These aren't too bad until you're stacking them all with platforming or mixed combat, but you can end up with some brutal situations. There are numerous puzzles and challenges combining platforming, combat, and/or puzzling simultaneously—or even hybrid combat situations of various enemies—that can be frustrating because of the features I'll outline below. This game is RELENTLESSLY punishing with contact damage, fall damage, and knockback, and you can easily take 3-4 instances of damage from one hit. Early game, this is especially bad, and I made the ultimate mistake of going to the Bayou first. To complement all of the frustration of above is the contact damage, which triggers interrupts and knockback. With the tight platforming sections, you will likely die in a lot of places to getting knocked into a hole or pit. It is absolutely maddening in some spots, especially if you try to zerg a hit, only to get bamboozled by your deadzone before getting knocked off. I switched weapons early on multiple times, and found no particular ease to this, and just had to keep replaying a few parts until I got it. I really hate this function when it comes to a few of the bosses and trying to gauge their hurtboxes, or movements, since Mina is a small mouse, and you're trying to fight some 15-20 foot monstrosity that moves around a large arena quickly. Difficulty: This game in general is HARD. You can grind upgrades and levels at any time, so there's levels to scaling the general difficulty... to a point. Make no mistake, the game absolutely scales to a damn hard challenge towards the end. I didn't enjoy the second-to-last boss very much (due to design, but he's tuned to be hard in general), and a lot of the hybrid platforming challenges in the final zone were aggravating as heck. You could say skill issue, and I won't blame you, but it was the same things that bothered me from early in the game, but now everything was more difficult, despite me being more seasoned. I liked the challenge, but I felt like I was fighting the controls just as much as the game itself in some spots. No area more so than the final platforming challenge of the game, which I felt I had to brute force with fall damage and respawn points. This is, imo, where all of my personal gripes come from. Mina just feels out of place against the rest of the game when this is happening. Like she's a hair too slow, or a tiny bit too lacking in maneuverability. I see a lot of people having a similar sentiment reading around, but everyone seems to have different reasons for their complaints with any part of the game. You'll often see they say Mina is clunky, but that's not how I would describe it. Everything is smooth in application, but just... off. The game is clearly designed around her limitation, but maybe it just bothers *me* too much. It just feels a bit unfair at times when you're struggling to deal with getting knocked around or enemies/bosses moving into you when you're trying to space yourself for attacks. Nothing annoyed me more than the ones where you're platforming, and one obnoxious flying enemy keeps knocking you into a pit, and the damn thing is really hard to hit because it only swoops down a little bit, and usually ends up over a safe spot you can't reach. While I cruised midgame, it was not 'easy'. You shouldn't suffer from a lack of challenge or engagement from the game. Conclusion: Ultimately, I'll still easily recommend this (it takes a lot for me to not actually recommend a game), but there were parts that sucked the fun out of it. It sounds like I'm hating on this, but I'm really not. There's just parts of the game that feel were overly punishing with the other mechanics for what it's challenging you with. It really needs a sequel to improve a few gameplay interactions for them a little bit to smooth out what I feel is its only shortcoming. There's a lot of story, and an incredible foundation of design and creativity here, and I look forward to what they'll do next. If you want a challenging game with a neat story, subverted expectations of said story, a great world, strong progression, interesting gameplay facets, and a lot of combat options... Mina the Hollower is certainly worth picking up. Again, my complaints are personal to me and my experience, and they are *not* universal. I encountered zero bugs, and eventually outplayed everything to complete the game. I don't feel disappointed in any of this, and I would buy a sequel in a heartbeat.