Mina the Hollower

Mina the Hollower doesn’t only trade in nostalgia; it’s a game that could only have been made today. But if you’re looking for vintage Sega or Nintendo-alike magic, here it is. A simple, perfectly satisfying move, spun out into 20 hours’ worth of fun, squeezing out every possible surprise and delight along the way. As links to the past go, this is hard to beat.

Mina the Hollower is a brilliant 2D action-adventure game that takes clear inspiration from classic Zelda while building something that feels fresh, challenging, and uniquely its own. Its open-ended exploration, clever combat systems, strong sense of discovery, and flexible modifiers make every part of the adventure feel personal. While its difficulty can spike, Mina the Hollower stands out as an instant classic and one of the best games in its genre.

Mina the Hollower is an action RPG that takes the best of Zelda, Castlevania and the Soulslike genre without ever feeling like a copy. Yacht Club Games builds a dense, challenging, incredibly smart and personality-driven adventure, capable of turning every screen into a continuous discovery.

Mina the Hollower delivers expansive exploration, a world full of personality, and a constant sense of discovery through its varied situations and inventive systems. While the journey occasionally stumbles with cumbersome backtracking, some combat limitations, and minor frustrating moments, these issues never overshadow the overall experience. Few games manage to turn seemingly simple mechanics into something this creative and engaging, and with memorable encounters, secrets hidden everywhere, and an island that always feels ready to reveal something new, the game proves there is far more beneath its retro-inspired surface than first appears.

Mina the Hollower is one of the best indie games I've played in a long, long time. It borrows familiar ideas from Zelda, Dark Souls, and a million others to make its own, and offers endless choice and variety in how you carve your way through its world. It's an uncommon tribute to classic games that often surpasses the quality of the titles that inspired it.

Mina The Hollower provides a great experience - it's fun, it's excellently designed most of the time, and it's very rewarding in terms of the combat system and the exploration experience, but each of these truly good elements also has a negative point, whether it's the level of difficulty and the reliance on Soulslike systems that sometimes feel simply unrelated to this game, or if we're looking directly at the design of some of the game's areas.

A retro-styled 8-bit action adventure, there's a lot to like about Mina the Hollower if you don't mind a challenge. But unforgiving combat, accessibility options that lock out achievements, and lack of any guidance makes this a more frustrating experience than it should be.

This is the kind of game that, while may seem divisive at first glance, is the type of game that if it really meshes with you, you will love it. And even if you don't, you can feel the love and passion oozing out of every frame of the game, Yacht Club Games is once again, at the top of their craft.

When it's firing on all cylinders, this a joyful game. When it isn't – which is often – it can be tiresome. The balancing is off the wall, being either too hard or too easy most of the time. The lack of a detailed map is a misjudgement that's hard to fathom. Some of the level design is A+, some is C-. A strange one. A 7/10.

I love this game when it is trying to be Link's Awakening and Castlevania. I **** hate this game when it is trying to be Dark Souls. I have said it before and I will say it again, the modern overuse of soulslike mechanics as a means of difficulty has really become a crutch in modern game design. There are /plenty/ of ways to make a game challenging without having it constantly waste the player's time, and this game just wastes the player's time way too damn much. Yes, there are modifiers that alleviate this, but that feels like a band-aid added late in the development to plaster over a balancing issue that YCG either could not fix or did not try to fix. To the game's strength, the exploration, world design, sound design, and pixel art are all top notch. I have not had as much fun in a long long time exploring, discovering, and stumbling into new areas while seemingly looking for something unrelated. There is a certain kind of magic here that unfortunately gets mired in soulslike tedium. Still, I enjoyed the vast majority of my time with it.

I am not seeing what others are evidently seeing with this game. I am absolutely the target market for this game, and it is a chore. The combat and the controls overall feel awful and the exploration is pure tedium. Originally gave it a 6, but as I'm sitting here thinking about it, it deserves lower.

It's unbelievable that those old-fashioned ghost face-jumping scares from the internet are actually in a pixelated indie game. Isn't this pure malicious intent towards players? Dev is probably quite proud of it. There are also many other details that are simply inhumane and designed to disgust players.