Mina the Hollower

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.

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.

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.

As many others seem to feel, i'd really love to leave a better review, but I just can't get the game to click for me. I'm a humble gamer far from being considered "good" by the internet's standards, and i'm not averse to a good challenge once in a while, but Mina just doesn't concede a fraction of an inch right from the get go, and that's my one and only gripe with the whole situation: it's not transparent. The game lulls you into thinking you'll be on a merry, old schooled journey clearly inspired by Zeldas Oracle of Agesons, shows you colourful bits of last hits on enemies and exploring around fun looking areas, while right off the main hub the most basic enemies will 3 shot you while you're still trying to figure out the timing to burrow efficiently (that's your only/main dodge mechanic, at least in the beginning, takes about a second to get underground, and enemies attack fast). You may think of hiding underground as being somewhat protected, but apparently Mina has to keep her whiskers out of the ground since fire still hurts you, as well as some spikes (maybe the pole is spiked too? dunno about that one), but not all of them, so figuring those out will add taking some hits here and there. The basic healing system is the most inconvenient estus copy I had seen so far, again feels like pushing a trendy mechanic into a game that could have easily been as fine with simple enemy health drops, like old times (the times you're trying to evoke, nudge nudge). The one and only boss i've fought besides tutorial rat is a flying house that still hits you when you're 3-4 tiles behind it, kicks at you with seemingly inconsistent range, and suddenly decides to switch to phase 2 without even a semblance of telling, and begins covering the screen with bombs inbetween attacks. After toning down the difficulty and beating it, the area he guards led me to only pathetic gem chests and dead ends/doesn't open from this side pathways, so it felt like accomplishing nothing at all, and learning to navigate that area a waste of time. Even with the wide selection of difficulty adjusters, the game at its core seems to just want to be as frustrating as possible just for the sake of it, and I cannot stress this enough, that's perfectly ok long as the developers have the heart to let the audience know before purchasing based off nostalgia and love for old games. Or even better, release an hour long demo and let us get the feel for it. Just like old times Edit: for clarity's sake, this review only wants to be a warning for incoming potential buyers - I know i'm bad at the game and it's great if you, reader, have finished and loved it. If the devs edit the game description on the Steam page to be more clear about the true nature of the game, beyond its charming looks, i'll delete this right away.

Can be challenging, but lots of ways to mitigate or change up strats. Overall enjoyed it.

Totally love playing a game that's designed to be as frustrating as possible. Controls are clunky, gameplay is confusing, every enemy does a million damage to you, and it feels like the game is NOT on my side. Waste of my money and time.