In simpler terms, Mina the Hollower communicates more forcefully than Shovel Knight ever did. The latest retro action game by Yacht Club Games is essentially a Zelda-like game with a mouse character, and it’s exactly the kind of game that I would have been captivated by on my Game Boy Advance, playing until the batteries ran out.
Yacht Club Games Kickstarted Mina the Hollower in 2022, raising over $1.2M, and today it’s dropping a demo you can play on Steam before it fully releases on October 31.
Right from the start, Mina the Hollower blasts off with an eerie 8-bit landscape that resembles 2001, slowly unfolding as her mouse character takes center stage, ready to purge this kingdom of monstrous creatures in the opening scene. There’s a hint of Castlevania and Bloodborne here, which I’ll elaborate on shortly. Without much backstory, you dive into a fresh game and find yourself waking up amidst a ship under siege by a colossal sea creature.
I grabbed two daggers and began cutting a path through monsters, leaping over obstacles and discovering hidden chambers as I ventured further into the haunted island where the action unfolds. There are throwing axes and other projectiles you can collect that make dealing with airborne creatures easier, and Mina can burrow underground to dodge attacks. Burrowing can also help get past gates and under boulders to hurl at tougher enemies, and a boss in the demo strikes so powerfully that burrowing is the most effective strategy to prevent losing a significant chunk of your health bar.
In simpler terms, drinking a healing potion will restore Mina’s vitality. This is similar to the system in Bloodborne where vials act as instant healing, but you can also regain health by counter-attacking after being hit. Mina, being a Hollower like characters in Bloodborne, doesn’t have an evasive move such as a dodge roll. However, she does encounter checkpoints that allow you to exchange the bones gathered from monsters for upgrades to enhance your defense and attack power.
The settings are packed with concealed pathways and ropes ascending to higher areas. During my 30-minute playthrough of the demo, I kept tripping over hidden secrets left and right. There’s a guide in the menus that suggests you can utilize a brief invincibility period after taking damage to bypass harmful obstacles, indicating that there will be numerous tight spots to navigate in the full game.
And that is exactly the type of game I would play on my purple GBA as a kid. If it wasn’t Pokémon, I was running around swiping at grass in A Link to the Past for rupees. Each level in Mina the Hollower is packed with so many things to break and climb and burrow under that I was spending more time poking at everything than actually making forward progress. It’s just fun to see what’s possible and where things lead, and the game doesn’t hesitate to reward you for doing so.
The Mina the Hollower demo rules and is playable right now on Steam. Yacht Club Games says we’ll get the full thing on October 31.
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2025-06-07 01:19