Review Code Provided by Yacht Club Games

A copy of Mina the Hollower (MSRP $19.99) was provided for review on PlayStation. While I am grateful and humbled, this opportunity did not influence my review of Mina. Yacht Club Games did not see this review before publication or offer any guidelines beyond a standard embargo. Thank you for understanding.

Spoiler Warning

I do talk about the way to access the final level of the game, which may be considered a spoiler by some. But if I were you, I'd want to know before I started.

I have always been obsessed with getting my handheld games on the big screen. From the Game Boy Player to the Analogue Pocket to modding my 3DS, I have had a lifelong pursuit of tiny games on big screens.1 Growing up playing a Game Boy in the back of a minivan meant playing smaller, weirder, divergent titles. I cut my teeth on the likes of Pokémon Blue, Mega Man Battle Network 3, and Link's Awakening. In fact, the first time I played Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight was on my 3DS during a road trip. When I got back home to my Wii U weeks later, I immediately bought the home console version.

I've been a champion of Yacht Club ever since. I bought the game for my friends, visited the team at PAX East 2019, and reviewed quite a few of their games over the years. When Mina the Hollower was announced in 2022, I closed out my blog post with this:

"The current window for Mina The Hollower is December 2023. That’s a solid two more years of development time. Eager to see how this one lands."

Nearly three years after the original target date (making games is hard!), Mina the Hollower is out in the world. Mina is a modern fusion of the aforementioned Link's Awakening, Castlevania titles, and modern "Soulslike" ideas all gelled together with Yacht Club's signature retro-inspired, modern-infused design principles. On paper, it's a dream game for the likes of me.

In reality, it is a grandiose, modern title crammed into the constraints of handheld games of yore. Yacht Club Games' ambitions do not fit in this box. Mina is dense. Mina is irritating. Mina breaks my heart.

The story of the game is simple. Someone is attacking snazzy electrical towers that power the realm. Fix the towers, stop the rebel. Quickly, the game drops the classical good versus bad angle and hides behind a thin veil of a more complex narrative by having the "villain" explain themselves in a letter. The generators are actually poisoning the earth and creating monsters. The mayor/governor/oligarch/whatever knows this and is hiding it from the residents. You just keep on fixing the towers though. It lacks a backbone to drive the player forward.

The actual gameplay starts with choosing a starter weapon à la Pokémon. You can snag a legally distinct Belmont whip, dual-wield daggers, or a big chonking hammer. Unlike Pokémon, if you make the wrong choice, there is no rapid and apparent replacement. I chose the hammer and it made my opening hours miserable. I could not find a groove and always felt like I was facing the wrong direction, stuck in a holding pattern as the thing charged. I debated wiping 3~ hours of progress just to go back and change to the daggers or whip.

I pressed on and found the daggers. I equipped them ASAP to only be disappointed with the minor pushback each hit gives Mina. With positioning being vital in combat, willingly picking a weapon that altered my placement felt illogical. John Linneman was also not fond of the daggers. You'd never know these qualms in the opening. There is no chance to try them in a combat setting before commitment. Rather than learn to deal with a new frustration, I stuck with the devil I was already getting to know and pressed onward.

A few hours later, maybe halfway into the second level I ended up in, I did start to click with the hammer. I found the shield at some point, but didn't even want it. I was content with the hammer especially after getting the King Dedede-like rocket hammer upgrade. I don't think I found the whip or the gun. Instead of being some hammer expert, I feel like I developed Stockholm syndrome for its brutal strength and AOE. I was bashing my way through the world. With the hammer, every obstacle, every enemy, every objective became a nail that I'd wail on to just make some form of progress.

The world has an open design. You can go to any level in any order with nothing gated. It's a popular design choice these days and, when executed well, gives the player agency. There is a suggested order and the game elegantly tells you the cardinal direction, but beyond that Yacht Club gives you nothing. There is no map like in a Zelda or a Castlevania game. You are left to your own devices to find the levels.

The advised second world is a purply, slurpy bayou which is described as west of the central town, Ossex. I go west and hit a wall. Now do I go up or down? I pick a direction and don't find any sort of swamp. I go the other way and somehow loop back to Ossex. I double-check the sign—yep, the bayou is to the west. Maybe I need to go down first from Ossex and then left? Nope. Dead ends. I banged my head against the walls until I stumbled into an autumn themed area. I truly do not know how I got there and doubt I could replicate it. This was Septemburg, the game's suggested third level.

The only obvious location in the entire game is the frozen mountain because the only advertised way there is paying for a train ticket.

I think this navigation issue stems from on screen density. Mina is jam packed. There is no unused pixel. Each square is full of art, enemies, and bottomless pits. Subtle cracks that may harbor secrets or just be set design line the walls. Hidey-holes indicate rooms inside structures, adding this mental layered map you want to try and hold together.

The density makes it feel like there is something behind every pixel. I just can't tell which pixels are important. Am I missing the entrance to a new level? Is there a hidden chest? Some new shortcut? A weird cutscene? This compaction feels like Yacht Club Games is okay with you missing routes, easter eggs, and environments. The question then is, am I okay with that? Sure, in a general sense, but when I can't find the next level, I am not.

I read that if you stand in the dark too long a clown jump scares you. I missed that. A friend mentioned another boss in the snow level. Where? I felt like I explored that whole area. I feel like I am missing so much. Maybe it is the retired guide writer in me, but this concentration is too much for my secret-seeking brain. I'm not even trying to 100% the game, but when I can't even find the front door to the next level, this pressure to know the map builds. I found myself only able to play for 60 minutes at a time. Mina is a tungsten cube. I am a can of Diet Coke.

Besides theming and being difficult to find, each level has a unique movement quirk/challenge for the player to adapt to if they want to proceed. The mining beach is full of metal plates and conveyor belts. Septemburg is chock full of immovable piles of leaves, only capable of being destroyed by fire. Get ready to go swimming in the swamp and to slip and slide on the mountain top.

This turns platforming into a puzzle to solve, which is fine in a puzzle platformer, like perhaps Frogger 2 on the Game Boy Color. It's not fine in a combat action adventure game where every hit has knock back, some weapons knock you back, and depth perception is determined by shaded and angled pixels. I felt like I was fighting the navigation and movement every step of the way, which is such a shame because Mina's core movement is sublime.

As a "hollower," Mina can dive under the ground and then pop back up a short distance later. This allows Mina to reposition, speed up, and gain horizontal distance on a jump. It's clear, clean, and elegant. I love it. I'd argue this is Mina's biggest win. Then Yacht Club can't seem to get out of their own way, adding all that unnecessary friction.

When you make your way to the end of a level, you'll face a boss that is either too difficult or too easy, never one that Goldilocks would approve of. And then there is the tower. Oh how I loathe the tower segments. Like a long lost Sonic mini game, Mina must ascend a pseudo-3D tower packed with enemies and barricades. You jump into these rings and try to outrun an electrical current. If you die or hit the electricity, you fall to the bottom and try again. There is so little clarity on where to go that the only way through is by gritting your teeth. There's no way to lose lives or currency. If there was, people would quit at the first tower. Your only punishment is to try again until you make it to the top.

Pulling from the likes of Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, there is a currency/EXP in Mina called "Bones" that you lose upon death. Where Mina evolves the concept is by giving you built in attempts to get said currency back by way of "Sparks," aka lives. Instead of a traditional game over though, you just lose the bones you had on hand. The more levels you clear, the more Sparks you have. It's fair and even gracious at times. I never felt robbed of my Bones.

Despite my qualms with the navigation of the world, it is quite beautiful to look at. Yacht Club Games knows their pixel art and demonstrates their mastery of the medium on every frame. What's more is that the entire game runs at 4K and at 120 FPS—all under 1GB. It is a technical achievement to be sure.

That gigabyte includes chiptune wizard Jake Kaufman's brand new, 96-track score for the game, which comes in at 585MB from the mp3 download from Jake's Bandcamp.2 The music is...good. It is well done. It has that classic sound that I feel like I have known my entire life. And yet, nothing stands out. No level theme hit for me. No ear worms nestled their way into my gray matter. Even when I just listened to the soundtrack while working, nothing got my head bopping and the fingers flying across the keyboard. It feels like the background coffee shop music equivalent for a game. It matches the vibe, but stays in the background, never elevating the game to a higher status.

The whip that broke the proverbial mouse's back was accessing the final world—Astral Orrery. You hear all about this outer space place and can even spot it in a telescope. Yet, there is no indicator about how to get there. The secret is to walk into a mirror Super Mario 64 style. The only way to learn this is by catching a glimpse of an NPC walking in the mirror or stumbling across a side room in the frozen mountain that shows the same tidbit.

The problem is that when you walk to a mirror, there's a prompt to play with the mirror and do cutesy faces with Mina. This implies that the sole function of the mirror is this little game and not some secret fast travel system and the final level. Here's a Semi-Ramblomatic video about this very situation.

Even more frustrating though is that you cannot open the door into the level without flipping switches in each of the other levels behind their hidden mirrors. It's a late-game hidden fetch quest. You have to go back through the world. You have to go find these hidden mirrors. Find them all and flip the switches to open the gate to the final level.

My first thought of comparison was The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and its late game Triforce fetch quest. If my memory serves me correctly, you find a map that Tingle has to mark up, then sail around the world talking to fish and collecting nine (?) pieces of the Triforce before going to the final dungeon in the Tower of the Gods. It is criticized as a pace killer. I never minded it as a kid. I think part of that was how much I loved sailing on the ocean blue and navigating the world. It was open and full of air. Not littered with dead space, but packed with discovery and possibility. It wasn't a crammed, dense affair. Maybe my rose-tinted glasses are obfuscating my memories? Perhaps I hate the Triforce quest as a 32-year-old?3

At 17 hours in Mina with my frustration escalating, with a rough estimate of another 5 to 7 hours left, I said no. I quit and I am not going back.

That breaks my heart. I have beaten every other game Yacht Club has created. I enjoyed each one and champion them to anyone who is willing to listen. I see Mina's incredible high review average and wonder what's wrong with me. What am I missing that the others see? Am I old and washed up? Have I lost my touch with top down action adventure games that I spent countless hours mastering in the back of my folks' minivan? I'd hope not.

Yacht Club Games kept building and building, but seemingly never stopped to ask what are the consequences of all of these mechanics and pixels and screens and layers and annoyances. They pursued modern design principles and complexities without checking to see what these towers of modernity were doing to the rich, classical soil beneath their feet. As they cranked on, the ties to the past that inspired them succumbed to the weight of ambition. A pressure to succeed crumbled the foundation. I hope Yacht Club finds a balance as they go forward with whatever is next. As for Mina, I hope I never have to play it again.

Footnotes

  1. I may be the only person in the world to upscale the Tingle Tuner to 4K on native GBA hardware. ↩

  2. The soundtrack is split in two on Apple Music, if you prefer. ↩

  3. Perhaps a better example is any of the Metroid Prime games and their end of game fetch quests with invisible objects. Man, those suck the wind out of the end game sail. I have played all of those far more recently than Wind Waker and I didn't want to quit those games. The worlds at least are easy to move through, especially in the late game. ↩