Mina The Hollower Review – Mouse’s Mastery Of Mystery

It’s scary to think that it’s been 12 years since the launch of Shovel Knight. The summer after, I was lying in bed, deeply sick, isolating from my family, with an awful HP laptop by my side, clearing the game from start to finish every single day. Everyone online was raving about it, and with each of its three DLCs upping the bar, it quickly became one of the defining indies of the 2010s. Yet, and it feels even crazier to say this, I think modern audiences may either not be aware, or have simply forgotten just how good Yacht Club Games is at what they do.

Mina the Hollower has arrived after years of delays to remind everyone of the fact that these developers are some of the most dedicated perfectionists in the space. Their ability to imprint each screen permanently into your memory by filling it with unique challenges and introducing new ideas on the fly makes it seem like they have solved video games as we know them… and I haven’t even begun talking about their new game yet!

Playing their first new IP since 2014 feels genuinely surreal. I’ve been playing games enabled in part by Shovel Knight’s success for a decade now, and they rarely had the same level of polish. I’ve grown to believe that not every single moment of the game needs to be firing on all fronts. Not all games need to be this maximalist. Perhaps they can’t be.

This one can. Yacht Club Games is at the top of their game every single second, in each of its 1,200+ screens, all 25 hours of my first playthrough and beyond. Mina the Hollower is just unbelievable—it has the most “cool things per second” I’ve ever seen in a game this long. And it really needed to be this perfect, as without all that immersion, there’s no way it would work.

See, this is an exploration-heavy game that has no map. I know taking notes and drawing maps by hand is a long-lost tradition by now, but I still do it, and I was fully prepared for that with Mina the Hollower. Yet, to my surprise, I never had to. Yacht Club Games have once again completely overtaken my every waking hour. Each time I passed by a chest I couldn’t reach, I would spot a new opportunity that sometimes actually worked! Maybe a spot to burrow under or a sidearm I could throw over a gap. I know the Tenebrous Isles better than I know my local streets. To be fair, they don’t have cool upgrades and gems for me. They just have passable kebabs.

Lacking a map has become a bit of a selling point in recent years. Players want harder experiences, deeper secrets. No hand-holding. Layers of intrigue. Old-school sense of discovering the world on your own terms. Well, if you want secrets, you shouldn’t be reading reviews, should you? Still, if that’s what you’re looking for, know that you won’t find gigantic, new areas by striking a wall, instead you’ll usually be met with a quick challenge and a reward at the end or, on rare occasions, a boss. The exploration is truly great for one reason: it’s all open to you from the start.

There is no ability that you can get from beating a boss or progressing through the story that will unlock new parts of the map for you. From the moment Mina leaves the town of Ossex following a bit of turmoil to get there, you can reach any one of its seven Spark Towers then and there in any order, and find all of its collectibles and reach trinkets or sidearms that enable them. On replays, like in most of my favorite RPGs, you can get your ideal build in the first 30 minutes and go ham fighting bosses.

Open-ended design does have its strengths and weaknesses. Finding a more difficult area earlier will leave others to be far easier. There are pointers on the ideal progression path via newspapers and NPCs walking around in Ossex that have some helpful hints, but if you just want to go at it, you can and should. Found yourself in a spot that feels a bit hard? It’s totally fine to perish as a way of getting back. Though the game has a mechanic for losing currency on death, it actually takes at minimum two deaths for it to take effect. Mina has Sparks, the number of which you can expand with upgrades, and only when those run out without collecting them back do you lose out on your collected Bones. You also automatically get them all back on a level-up.

That’s right, Bones. They form into bone gems called Bonestone too, and you can save those up in a sort of bank in your hideout. The game’s currency is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to its horror aesthetic. Mina the Hollower reaches for all sorts of tricks, from the simple jumpscare to genre classics such as serial killers, ghosts, and freakishly large animals. Though certainly cuter and sillier than something like Bloodborne or Resident Evil, it’s a very effective mashup that gives the game so much identity. If we never made it to 3D, I’m sure The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask would look a lot like Mina the Hollower.

For all its dangers, I personally never felt that Mina the Hollower was particularly difficult. Maybe it’s the fact I spent so much time exploring and thus leveling up before committing to any one objective, or maybe it’s all my time playing every game the past couple of years on hard mode, but the amount of leeway gained thanks to the game’s best trinkets (more heals, more mobility, etc.) was enough to make me cruise by pretty effortlessly bar one boss I clearly attempted too early.

This doesn’t mean I didn’t absolutely love the combat. It’s fast, and your defensive option of burrowing takes a second to get going as it requires a jump. The weapons have unique approaches to combat, from a parry shield to a gun that requires melee hits to recharge bullets. Your defense requires offense, however, with a variation on Bloodborne’s rally system, where hitting things builds up a meter that decides how much you heal with your flask. That action has perhaps the longest animation a player can perform, so you really need to think about your positioning and the enemy’s patterns to heal.

Plus, if you need that extra kick, there are options to make the game more difficult in the modifier menu. With a game so freeform in its exploration, I can certainly recommend the “scale combat” option so that no matter where you go, you will get appropriately. These options were a hotly debated topic for a short time pre-release, but it need not be entertained aside from the fact that it’s easy to make life just slightly harder for yourself even without them. Change a weapon after each boss to never feel too familiar with one. Avoid leveling up. Don’t use sidearms. That last one felt like a default to me after years of playing melee in any game with magic.

For those that know the fun of a good modifier, this is an absolute wealth of options that can really hone in on whatever it is you want out of the game at any given moment. Lean more into RPG aspects, less into them. Make the game just slightly harder, or create a challenge run from your worst nightmares. The game even has built-in corruptions like a spinning screen, modified character size, or random weather effects. I love it!

Don’t go too hard on them on your first run though, as a few do lock you out of interacting with some of Mina the Hollower’s incredible NPCs. Found either in the busy city of Ossex or hidden in all sorts of optional areas and caves, this is a world that, unlike a lot of its inspirations, is truly bustling with life, still only in the earliest stages of decay. The hub fills with NPCs from around the island every time you clear an area. This not only doesn’t detract from its horror, but adds to it.

The game opens up with all the passengers on your ship dying to the appendages of a sea monster. Said ship gets destroyed as the groovy soundtrack makes you think you have a chance against the creature. You press onward. Why does everyone you meet in Ossex seem so secretive? Why is there a wriggling door inside this store? Why are there several beggars in a town with this gigantic mansion and guards when the currency is just bones from monsters outside? Perhaps it’s for the best that Mina rolls solo.

Alongside your tools, the soundtrack will be your only constant companion, and it is so, so catchy. Like with a lot of systems and ideas for this game inspired by Game Boy Color, we are still progressing and mastering the tunes of chiptune. It’s shocking how much emotion comes out of these wobbles, how enticing and adventurous the switches are in action tracks. Jake Kaufman has been such a consistent bright light in the space for 26 years now, and I can still confidently say that Mina the Hollower has some of his best work to date.

Mina the Hollower as a whole, like the annoying, teleporting red slimes, absolutely oozes personality. Visuals: cute but frightful, crazy boss designs, insane backgrounds. Sound: thumps and whooshes of weapons, screams of monsters, pitter-patter of mouse feet. Music: a sense of discovery, horror, and adventure personified. Exploration: mystery, surprise, memorable room layouts. Story: short and sweet interactions, strong presentation, hilarious character gimmicks. Combat: fast, different, open for player experimentation. Conclusion: a masterpiece.

Yacht Club Games has done it again, but bigger. The only gripe I may have is that it lacks those meditative moments from some of its inspirations—it’s so carefully hand-crafted that I felt like I was operating at 100% at all times, even in the few safe zones as I searched for secrets. It’s a game that sticks with you until you hit credits, and even after, knowing full well you missed that one chest you passed by twenty times. Ironically, the value of downtime is something that many games inspired by Shovel Knight understood and took advantage of, in no small part thanks to their limitations.

So, the worst thing I can say about Mina the Hollower is that, in a way, it’s just too packed to slow down and let you appreciate everything about it. The more I look at it, the sillier it sounds, but the feeling’s real! I love Mina the Hollower, and if the world is going to be alive, I would love to be a bigger part of it. The NPCs here have some reactivity too, as sometimes there will be someone to respond to an upgrade or a trick you’ve learned. It’s like a tease of what could have been, even if there’s still more than I expected!

I want to leave you with the scariest thought of all. Not the jumpscare kind, as found in the game. Not about the terror of allowing once celebrated art to slip by in the waves of new releases. Not an observation of how whatever form we see rise may never see its true potential until it’s revisited many years later. No. Here’s something to keep you up at night: even though Mina the Hollower is the biggest and best game from Yacht Club Games, a feat of mastery of this formula and a masterpiece in its own right, I truly believe they still have room to grow. In this industry, nothing is sure, so to make it happen, you’ll just have to play one of the best action-adventure games ever. The horror!

Mateusz reviewed Mina the Hollower on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.