Mina the Hollower

Brisk brew.

<3

Absolutely a masterpiece. Completing the game 100% was a challenge. The one thing I will improve is the backtracking as it is a bit tedious. Other than that, if you love the Souls genre and 2D Top Down in general play this game!

Perfect game. No notes. If you're into these sort of things, this is one of the best. Great build diversity, great soundtrack, combat is fun, plenty of locals. Maybe the ODDEST secret ending conditions, but super interesting how they did it :P I don't got it in me, but kudos to those who do. Just super cool game, very fun. Can't wait for the studio's next game.

wow. just wow. this game rocks, if you have 20 bucks BUY this game~

This is a good example of a thumbs-to-the-side game. However, due to Steam's system, I am giving it a recommend because what has been done here is very intentional and done with extreme polish. This game is very devisive as a zelda, castlevania, soulsian mash up of a game. This game is objectively challenging; there is no sugar coating it. The primary focus of combat is the burrowing mechanic that requires you to commit into a vulnerable jump before you can briefly traverse underground unharmed. This is paired with a healing system that requires you to damage enemies without getting hit to build up your healing factor before you can use it. All the while rewarding you with its currency of Bones to spend on items, trinkets, and leveling, or face losing it on death. It's a system built on careful pacing in frantic encounters that reward those that capitalize small attack windows unscathe. Despite the many accessibility options available to make things easier, you will have to get with the program and engage with its combat system. But, those that can do so will find joy in learning its novel mechanics and overcoming what it requires of you. Thankfully you will know if this game is for you or not within the 2 hours Steam gives you to try and refund a game. Should you commit to this game, you will find there are actually many trinkets in the game that circumvent many of the demanding qualities of its mechanics. This is however only lulling you into false expectations, as the difficulty ramps up immensely in the final act, to a point where you cannot benefit from further progression or gridning; it's do or uninstall. And your reward for completing this skate pipe of a difficulty curve? An admittedly unsatisfactory story that doesn't answer many of the questions it lays out. I spill this out because there is a genuinely tightly well crafted game here with indepth combat and environemtns to explore. But it is a game one will have a better time with than myself if you know you will enjoy exploring these mechanics out the gate and expect not much else.

As someone who backed the Kickstarter for this game (barely; i only contributed enough for a single game key), I'm overall pleased with what Yacht Club Games delivered; but some aspects of Mina the Hollower left a sour taste in my mouth by the time I was done with it (at least for now). The game absolutely nails the "Game Boy Zelda" look and feel, and this is mostly to its benefit. The burrowing mechanic grew on me, and the game taught me how to make good use of it organically, by throwing enemies at me which required good burrowing to survive and defeat them. However, later enemies were so difficult for me to read that I tended to get by more on "burrow spamming" tactics, [i]combined[/i] with sheer repetition of dying to enemies over and over while trying to learn their patterns - and get my own impulsive habits under control - well enough to survive. The difficulty on the whole pervades every inch of the game, and while I found everything manageable for the most part, some areas and bosses were sheer cliffs in terms of difficulty spikes. Special mention goes to the [spoiler]Mined Mind[/spoiler], a boss that had me ready to snap my controller in two. The other difficulty spike I want to mention is the final boss itself - I just [i]could not[/i] adapt to their attack patterns or respond fast enough, and even with Mina's stats maxed out, I just couldn't keep up. I finally ran out of patience and just turned on the Assist Mode set of modifiers simply to stand a chance - and I had to turn on [i]even more[/i] difficulty-reducing mods before I finally "won". It is for this reason alone that I do not have the Steam achievement for beating the game, and that frustrates me to no end. I feel punished for not having enough dexterity and/or patience to overcome that final hurdle without help. I'm not going to delve into the entire topic of Souls-like games and difficulty modes and allowing achievements and yadda-yadda, for that way lies madness and flame wars. But I do think that there's a blurry line between [i]difficult[/i] and [i]punishing[/i], and I feel that Mina may have crossed into the latter by the endgame. With all that said, the game is very rewarding in other ways. Exploring for secrets is chief among them - you're bound to find some hidden challenge and feel incredibly clever for discovering it, and even moreso (well, clever or skillful) for overcoming that new challenge. There are hidden paths which lead to optional bosses, which may lead to greater rewards than the main area boss does. On the other hand, some aspects of exploration are [i]also[/i] rather frustrating. One (required!) dungeon is locked behind the act of finding at least three (out of four) special mirrors and doing something with them, and while that something has been made easier to figure out since launch (for example, the game basically tells you by the time you have to visit the dungeon), it can still be a pain in the butt to go [i]find[/i] those mirrors if you missed them exploring the areas your first go-round, even with all the shortcuts unlocked (or, quite likely, if you found them but didn't figure out what you were supposed to do!). Another problem is the Cash Gate (thanks for ruining my vocabulary, TV Tropes). Yet another (required!) dungeon is simply inaccessible until you have paid enough Bones to a certain fund. You have the opportunity to begin doing so in the early game, but the game doesn't tell you it's mandatory until you've cleared all of the other dungeons. I wasn't too bothered in practice, but only because I accidentally spoiled the fact that it was mandatory, and so I started dumping in Bones now and again if I wasn't feeling pressured to Bone Up and/or was worried about losing Bones to dying. It's a gimmick that potentially forces the player to grind for "money", if they hadn't already been grinding to Bone Up and/or have had an exceptionally bad time of losing Bones to dying. You'd think a certain character would be more than happy to pay to aid Mina's quest, if only to keep up appearances ... Anyway, I had a decent enough time with Mina overall, and the game is quite memorable, for reasons good and ill. I'm not planning on a replay any time soon, but I can't rule it out entirely (it likely won't be a NG+ run, however). I do love the characters, the art style (it's quite colorful!), and the music (Jake Kaufman delivers once again!), and honestly I even enjoyed the story, however predictable it may have felt. [spoiler]I knew who the real antagonist was before I even tackled the first dungeon, no spoilers necessary.[/spoiler] But the steep difficulty alone make it a difficult recommendation, even to battle-hardened players. One last thing: any folks hanging on to an Intel/x86_64 Mac are simply out of luck unless they choose to use Bootcamp or dual-boot with Linux. The game simply doesn't support that architecture for its macOS build. There is one build - based on 1.0.4 - which [i]might[/i] work and which YCG keeps available in the Steam servers as of this writing, but it is already out of date (and missing important fixes/tweaks). So Mac fans will need Apple Silicon/arm64, or another OS. (I know basically every Intel Mac is itself out of date and no longer supported for current versions of macOS, but it's still disappointing for me, as someone who regularly uses outdated hardware just to have a chance of affording it.) Them's the breaks, I guess.

very good game