Mina the Hollower

Only two hours in and its so annoying to play, I do not get how the people who made Shovel Knight thought these defensive mechanics were up to par. I feel like I must be the crazy one to have the controls feel so lackluster. Maybe it will get better as I push through this opening but damn.

This is going to make me sound insane but the dealbreaker came in the form of A) i don't like having to burrow and time unburrowing (basically a 'negative edge' jump) to superjump and B) why the ♥♥♥♥ are enemies incapable of being hit while flying, then can be hit while standing when they swoop, but when you JUMP, they still HIT YOU at GROUND LEVEL? Why do ONLY ENEMIES actually move in '3D space' when they jump/fly? and C) what do you mean i can't burrow under the statue? and D) what do you mean i can't burrow under the FIRE??? *OR* jump OVER it???? Honestly, i also was hoping for more "Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Rodents" and not "yet more 2D souls nonsense: hooray for souls-likes". i'm so ♥♥♥♥♥♥' over souls-likes and souls mechanics lol. On top of which, i don't give a ♥♥♥♥ when i level up, because the 'skills' you level advance in souls requirement (the souls you spend to level up the skills are not the currency you level up with, which i'm hoping sounds as stupid as it feels to type) in such large margins, you might as well just level each of the 4 along with each other. pick a random one of the four every level, and then repeat. i dunno. my sister loves it. i'm sure it's a me problem. but, for me, that's a problem.

수려한 아트, 훌륭한 OST, 흥미로운 세계관과 스토리, 하지만 불쾌하고 불합리한 전투가 모든 것을 깎아먹음 땅굴꾼이라는 주인공의 특징에 맞춰 독특한 이동 시스템을 넣은 건 좋다. 그리고 고전 게임을 표방한 장르 답게 상하좌우만 공격 가능한 시스템도 납득 가능하다 그런데 적들은 항상 플레이어의 대각선에 자리 잡고 탄막을 날려대고 온몸에 피격 판정을 지녔으면서 전방위로 맵을 휩쓸며 돌진 해댄다. 게다가 공격 빈도도 짧고 매우 호전적임 적들 뿐 만 아니라 모든 맵 요소들도 플레이어에게 적대적으로 작용하고, 항상 제작자의 의도에 저격 당하고 있다는 생각을 하지 않을 수가 없음 불합리하고 불쾌함이 만연한 시스템, 하지만 클리어가 불가능할 정도는 아니었기에 엔딩까지 봤음. 딱 그 뿐임 게임에 도전적인 요소는 필수 불가결이라 생각하지만, 이 게임은 그 정도가 조금 지나침 그걸 고전 게임의 구수한 맛이라고 포장 하면서 까지 고통 받으시고 싶으시다면 말리진 않겠음

I enjoyed playing this game alot and loved it while it lasted, but it pains me to say I wouldn't recommend it. The especially initial difficulty would be enough to drive away most people, and a great many things don't feel nearly as rewarding as they should be. For some reason, I can't put my finger on why it doesn't keep me coming back the way Shovel Knight does. It might honestly just be me; I used to be able to run Megaman Zero countless times, yet not so much nowadays so don't take my word for it. This isn't to say the game wasn't worth playing at all, I'd say it absolutely was~ The sprite work, level design, music, banter I enjoyed very much. And yet, if it truly was so enjoyable why do I feel so one and done with it...?

I don't wanna lose my money on this, so I'm stopping now, before I lose out on the refund window. If that makes my opinion invalid, go 112% Hollow Knight on Steel Soul mode. Let's talk health. Do you like health? I like health. It's especially good in a soulslike game. So how do we make our health system, specifically how we recover health? Well obviously, it's flask-based, because it's Soulslike. But also, make it a hit-to-heal system, like Bloodborne, except that when you hit enemies, it fills your flask. Alright, not awful, game is fast-paced. Now let's make it so you can't store health- your flask only fills up as much as you have missing health. Uh.. why? Now let's make your flask lose charge when you get hit. Why??? Now let's make your flask count extremely extremely limited, so you can't just burn small healing amounts of healing to preserve your work or you lose one of your very limited heal uses. WHY!?!? You don't get to heal in this game. Every single mistake is permanent, and in a game this precise and this punishing, at this point just have NO healing if your health system is like this!! This has a cascading effect on the rest of the game, because since you can heal, you can obviously afford to take more hits, right? So make the enemies do more damage, have the rooms house more enemies, require precise movement around some attack patterns- all fine things, but it requires some kind of tradeoff, like BEING ABLE TO HEAL YOURSELF!! This is a core system to the game, and it is flawed beyond comprehension- this is the kind of idea an AI would create if I asked it to make a healing system for a fast-paced Soulslike. It's mashing Bloodborne and Souls games together to create this frankenstein abomination of a system Literally one restriction needs to go, and the issue is fixed. If the flask doesn't empty when you get hit, your healing is at least guaranteed even if you make a small mistake while trying to fill the flask. If the flask count isn't restricted, you can use a flask pre-emptively, when you normally wouldn't, to ensure safety and preserve the work you did filling it this much If the flask filling restriction, you can store up good work to come back from a mistake you make later Fix any one of these, and the game solves itself. As it is, this game is a mess, and many small irritations that could easily be overlooked are magnified by how the health system is completely and utterly botched.

bit too hard

Looks pretty. Has the poor controls of a Game Boy Zelda game with enemies 10x as difficult. If you miss how those games feel, you'll love this one.

Beat the game and have some thoughts: - It is a throwback to the old design structures of tough retro topdown games. I played quite a few of them when I was a kid. The game is genuinely hard in really frustrating and sometimes grindy ways. I'm a kickstarter backer. - The narrative struggles (to put it kindly). The characters feel either really one dimensional, or absurdly stupid. There's a lot of charm to one-off characters that populate the world, but the plot characters fall very short. I think they crafted a pretty cool world but failed to really deliver on it. [spoiler]Mina is real dumb. Like she doesn't derive context clues or stop what she's doing partway through.[/spoiler] - I have big complaints about the ending. [spoiler]I get what they were going for, but it feels so contrived/feelsbad. The normal ending being 'everything sucks and everyone suffers the consequences' is just... a downer. It just destroys a cool world. I think a cooler alternate ending would've been realizing Lionel was bad and being disobedient and trying to stop him.[/spoiler]. - The fast travel could be a lot better, exploring the world feels tedious when you're crossing back across large portions of it. The modifiers system is the saving grace of the game. I'm glad to be able experience the fullness of this game in ~20 hours and glad I'm not spending more time here. I don't have a chip on my shoulder where I need to grind my face and spare time into difficult encounters to assert my gamer-ness. I think this has a lot of Yacht Club charm, but don't care for the writing at all. Some folks will want the difficulty but not me. I think there's other games that better respect your time, so a big skip from me. I don't regret backing, just sad how it turned out.