Hands-On Impressions – Digging Into The Mina The Hollower Demo

Yacht Club Games has been working for years to build the Shovel Knight world, characters and storylines. Now they are ready to bring something new to life. The studio is taking to Kickstarter once again to fund its newest project Mina the Hollower, which features a mousey protagonist with a familiar penchant for moving soil. I’ve spent quite a bit of time hands-on with the game’s demo, and while it’s a very early vertical slice, my first adventure with Mina offered a difficult yet promising look into what the final game may have in store.

Like Shovel Knight’s 8-bit homages to games like Mega Man, Yacht Club wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve. With a top-down camera, muted colors, and chunky pixels, Mina looks like it’s been ripped from a long-lost Game Boy Color cartridge. It sounds like one, too, with crunchy chiptunes providing staticky ambiance to Mina’s exploits. The world reminds me of Link’s Awakening, traveling across a grid of screens, solving puzzles, and defeating creatures like zombies, blobs, and hulking behemoths. However, Mina’s combat prowess takes more from Castlevania, cracking foes with a quick swing of her whip and utilizing secondary weapons called Sidearms like the arched toss of the Volt Hatchet or the boomeranging Gyro-Dagger. Sidearms are not as cheap as Castlevania’s. They require Joules to be replenished with potions.

Combat can be fun, and encourages creativity in attacks and mobility. However, it can also prove to be difficult and ruthless. It is strategic sometimes, and imprecise others. Sometimes I was able to die from obvious errors I made. Other times I felt like I didn’t have control over a situation and lost it. This is an early concept of what Yacht Club is looking to implement with the full Mina experience, so I’m not worried about some rough edges. This demo was full of unique and fun scenarios, which I enjoyed trying to survive in. You can increase your health and attack power with equipable trinkets. The demo started me off with four, and six more lay hidden in the gothic landscapes.

Mina is a Hollower and can dig underground faster than she can walk. To cruise across the ground and avoid enemy attacks, press the jump button. I can also maneuver underneath boulders or pick up pots that could be used to attack a baddie. Mina can also emerge from the ground and fly farther than the default hop if she uses it correctly. This burrowing mechanic is the core to Mina’s gameplay, offering benefits to combat and traversal, but also helps excavate buried items or locate hidden areas filled with treasure.

One area accessed frequently by burrowing is Mina’s Underlab, a sanctuary where I would refill my health, swap trinkets, and cash in Bonestone to level up. It’s the equivalent of a Dark Souls bonfire, allowing my health-restoring items to replenish and resetting all of the monster threats in the area I had previously dispatched. Whenever you die (and you will), you’ll drop an orb containing the bones – the currency used to buy items, as well as level-up experience – you had collected and failed to cash in before perishing. You’ll revive above the last Underlab you visited and set out to retrieve the calcium currency.

Mina the Hollower does exactly what I was expecting the Shovel Knight creators, but it is also something that Mina the Hollower doesn’t do. Yacht Club excels at mixing traditional ideas with new and appealing ways of doing things. It is a great thing that they didn’t forget these things and try something new. This has been a key part of the company’s success for the last decade. It is important to involve fans in development and mold and adapt to customer feedback. This helps ensure that the company continues its success. The project is now fully funded via Kickstarter. What’s been made available for us to demo is a great proof of concept that I’d love to play through a few more times to find every secret. Bad news: The delivery deadline is December 2023. It will be a long wait before I get the full game.

To see Mina the Hollower in action, check out both our New Gameplay Today and full demo playthrough without commentary.