Mina the Hollower Review

The town of Ossex is on fire. Thorne and his horde of troops have attempted to usurp control of it from Baron Lionel, the anthropomorphic lion who governs it from his Radiant Manor and has called you to Ossex to fix the spark generators that you had built for the town years before.

You are Mina, a mouse and brilliant inventor. Mina is a Hollower, a member of a guild tasked with studying the natural world. Your ship has crashed on its route to Ossex, attacked by a giant Lovecraftian monster, but at least you still made it to the shore of Tenebrous Isle in one piece. Your work can begin.

Mina the Hollower makes a tremendous impression in these opening moments, as you traverse the flaming, battle-scarred city of Ossex, a gothic delight populated by charming night creatures in Victorian clothes. It's like Bloodborne's Yharnam, if it were limned in the gorgeous but more limited pixels of the Game Boy Color, with fretting denizens cowering behind closed doors as the world outside falls apart.

Soon, this town returns to normal, or at least as normal as this strange Dickensian place ever was, and it becomes your central hub. You explore the Tenebrous Isle in search of the seven spark generators that power this world. Bogs, crypts, cliffs, shores, and mountains await. One particularly amusing realm resembles a place in permanent Fall, a sort of Halloweentown populated by crows and a particularly vicious pumpkin-limbed man.

The game plays like a combination of 2D Zelda and Dark Souls. If you've experienced games like Tunic, you have an inkling of what to expect here. You will die and die and die, and try and try and try again. You don't have souls as currency, but bones, which allow you to level up and purchase trinkets and sidearms -- the latter of which you lose upon death, along with your bones, after you run out of sparks. Obviously, it's to your benefit to return to the place where you died to retrieve your spark, so you can keep your valuables.

The early gameplay moments don't flirt with frustration but rather snog it, fully embracing the anti-easy trend revived and popularized by the Souls games. Mina doesn't run so much as power walk, like a murine professor hurrying to class. The enemies are faster and have a much more diverse range of motion than she does. I joke that when the creatures of Tenebrous Isle were released into the wild, everybody else flew off in all directions like doves, while Mina flopped onto her stomach.

Bosses are similarly challenging early on. The screens are busy with activity, and the fights often have multiple phases. But the increased risk of it all lends these battles a certain excitement and high feeling upon victory, even if it doesn't totally erase the memory of frustration. Later on, as you discover more trinkets to equip, the boss fights become immensely easier, giving the game a somewhat odd, inverted difficulty curve.

The world is more of a joy to behold than to explore. It's filled with unique characters and secret areas -- almost too many to even be secret -- but it's undermined by its persistent platforming challenges. Mina is easily knocked into pits by the numerous, nettlesome flying enemies, as you try to line her up just right to dish out an attack. Sometimes obstacles are hard to read, too, because they appear relatively flat on the screen. The creative "hollowing" mechanic, where Mina briefly burrows into the ground before popping back up, allows you to travel greater distances. But the delay in its timing makes it tricky to use as a dodge.

Modifiers allow you to greatly customize the game and minimize some of the challenges. These are fabulous accesibility additions; however, you end up doing the work of balancing a game yourself.

Mina the Hollower doesn't have any particularly great themes or characters. There's not a whole lot here that touches the heart or tickles the brain. The narrative focuses on fairly routine themes of betrayal. It's a game that is more focused on gameplay and exploration, like the works that inspired it.

Yet the ending did touch me in an unexpected way. It eschews the simple, sentimental conclusions that mar so many cartoonish works of art. It's the untidy final moments here that leave you asking most of your questions. You just wish that the game that came before it was a bit more inviting.

Image: Yacht Club Games