Mina the Hollower: A Souls game with a GBC aesthetic
Review of Mina the Hollower
Shovel Knight is one of those indie darling games. Made by a small studio with a focused vision. The gameplay is tight, the challenge is enough to keep you from getting bored, but not enough to make you rage quit, and the music is top-notch chiptune music.
One of the things that Shovel Knight did the best was pay homage to a beloved series that shares most of the same features: Mega Man. Shovel Knight cut down the difficulty a bit, but maintained the best parts of the Mega Man games without being too derivative.
I enjoyed Shovel Knight and all its DLC, but those kinds of games were never my favorites. I always loved adventure games more than anything else. Zelda games were my favorites growing up. When Yacht Club Games announced Mina the Hollower, I actually got pretty excited. A game by Yacht Club Games, who can clearly handle retro-inspired homages with care and tact, making a game styled after and inspired by the Game Boy Color Zelda games? It sounded perfect. It took another half a decade to actually come out, but I grabbed it as soon as I could.
Graphics ¶
The first thing that hits you is the way the game looks. It's like one of the Oracle Zelda games, but with a more vibrant color palette, a higher sprite limit, and higher resolution. The game looks relatively great. It doesn't push far enough past the GBC aesthetics to be jarring, but that's unsurprising from the Shovel Knight team, who have been quite tasteful in the past (even while deviating from strict technical limitations of the things that inspired them).
Aesthetically, though, it almost feels more Castlevania than Zelda. The perspective and area design are clearly GBC Zelda, but most of the background style and sprite design are more like Castlevania.
Music ¶
The music is brilliant. The themes fit the locations perfectly, and the variety is superb. There's nothing to note, and little to criticize.
Gameplay ¶
This is where the game disappointed me a little. It plays tightly, and the controls are very well-designed.
Mechanically, it plays a bit like a top-down Zelda game, but much more fluid, and much more combat-focused. The inspiration for much of the actual play of the game feels drawn more from the Souls games than either Castlevania or Zelda. The prime focus of the game is exploring regions, fighting lots of enemies, and having a limited number of Plasma Vials, which heal you. You have a rest location that respawns all enemies and refills your vials. The game has some puzzles and fetch quests, but the core gameplay loop is fighting weak enemies, fighting strong enemies, trying to push to the next campfire underground lab, conserving your estus flasks plasma vials, and fighting powerful bosses.
I found this disappointing, because I was excited for a game inspired by the Game Boy Zelda games, but what I got was a 2D Souls game inspired by the appearance of the Game Boy Zelda games. It's still fun, but it doesn't resemble any of those Zelda games at all in gameplay.
That said, there are plenty of novel and fun gameplay aspects. The burrowing lent itself to some interesting puzzles and solutions, and made the combat fast and dynamic. Being able to "burrow" through water was an interesting twist as well.
Plot ¶
This is a mixed bag.
You play as Mina, an anthropomorphic mouse who belongs to a guild of "Hollowers", inventors and researchers of terrestrial energy. There are energy sources called Spark Generators that you invented and left on your home island a decade ago. On a journey back to the island, your ship is attacked and wrecked, and you discover that the island has been overrun with rebels and monsters in your absence. Your old friend Baron Lionel, an anthropomorphic lion, requests that you fix the generators, most of which have been damaged and are no longer functioning.
The "spark" technology and the hollowers are an interesting enough concept, but the plot did nothing really all that interesting with them.
Spoilers
It's a bog standard environmental caution story, with a greedy baron (who is so obviously an end game villain that I knew he'd be the final boss the first time I saw him) and all the usual trappings. There was little to no attempt to hide Lionel's treachery, leaving the game with no twists and no surprises. The obvious symbolism between a mouse and a cat didn't do anything to add to this. Everything was obvious and surface-level.
It was an interesting premise, and the idea of "Hollowing" and the "Hollowers" were a cool concept, but the game didn't really do much with them as a whole (mechanically, the hollowing is well-executed, but plot-wise, Mina basically invented everything of consequence, and the rest of your guild is a set of side characters with no more significance than any other NPC with whom you can trade). The final conclusion once the game is over was somewhat interesting, but everything before that point was a paint-by-numbers "follies of science and industry" plot.
Conclusion ¶
This game is tailor-made for people who love Souls games and the aesthetics of the Zelda Oracle games and Castlevania. This is through-and-through a 2D top-down Souls game with more fluid combat. If you're expecting a Zelda-like puzzle and adventure game, that's better found elsewhere, like Isle of Reveries.
Score: / 5