Mina the Hollower

Yacht Club Games, the developers of Shovel Knight — an indie game taking inspiration from 8-bit classics with a digging mechanic — have finally released their first proper follow-up, Mina the Hollower: an indie game taking inspiration from 8-bit classics with a burrowing mechanic. This time it’s a top-down action adventure game in the style of the Legend of Zelda series, right down to an open world with monsters that will destroy you if you wander too far from the starting area.

It’s really good. I played through it twice: once properly, and then again with a bunch of modifiers to make the game easier and sillier (like the “butts” modifier, as seen below). At the start Mina is fairly weak, but you quickly level up her stats and unlock more and more “trinkets”, which allow you to equip modifiers (like moving faster on rough terrain, or burrowing for longer, or saving Mina if she jumps into a bottomless pit). By the end I was running around Tenebrous Isle willy nilly, looking for the last few secrets to plunder.

That said, it’s also a bit of a horror game. There are some legitimately creepy moments in the game, like being chased by a scarecrow monster, or being attacked by the townsfolk in Septemburg. You get a trinket for burying someone alive in a tomb. The bright and colourful visuals cut against it, but it’s a dark story.

Fun, tho. I really dug it¹. I mean, it was a joy to wallow in².