Mina the Hollower Demo Offers a Promising First Look

After spending years expanding the world and cast of Shovel Knight through add-ons and spin-off adventures, Yacht Club Games is at last preparing to make something separate from its spade-wielding hero. The developer has returned to Kickstarter to finance its latest game, Mina the Hollower, starring a mouse-like lead with an equally recognisable fondness for shifting earth. I spent a substantial amount of time playing the demo and, although it is only a very early vertical slice, Mina’s first outing delivered a challenging but encouraging indication of what the finished game could offer.

Mina the Hollower channels classic handheld games

As Shovel Knight paid 8-bit tribute to titles such as Mega Man, Yacht Club Games makes no attempt to hide Mina the Hollower’s influences. Its overhead viewpoint, subdued palette and bold pixel art make it seem as though it came from a forgotten Game Boy Color cartridge. It sounds the part as well: crunchy chiptunes create a suitably crackling backdrop for Mina’s adventures.

The setting recalls Link’s Awakening, with players moving between a grid of screens, completing puzzles and battling monsters including zombies, blobs and towering behemoths. Mina’s fighting style, however, owes more to Castlevania. She lashes enemies with fast strikes from her whip, while secondary tools known as Sidearms include the arcing Volt Hatchet and the returning Gyro-Dagger. As in Castlevania, using Sidearms consumes Joules, a resource restored by potions.

Whip combat and punishing encounters

The combat is enjoyable, encouraging inventive combinations of attacks and movement, yet its difficulty can be unforgiving. At times it feels tactical, but on other occasions it lacks precision. There were deaths caused by clear mistakes on my part, alongside moments when a situation seemed to slip beyond my control in ways that felt unfair.

This is only an early version of the approach Yacht Club intends to bring to the full Mina experience, so the occasional rough edge is not especially concerning. The demo still contained plenty of entertaining and distinctive encounters that I enjoyed fighting to survive. Equippable trinkets can soften the challenge by raising stats such as health and attack power. I began the demo with four, while another six were concealed throughout the gothic environments.

Burrowing through Mina the Hollower’s world

As a Hollower, Mina can tunnel beneath the surface, moving through soil more quickly than she can travel above ground. Holding the jump button lets her glide underground, avoiding enemies while positioning herself for attacks from relative safety. She can also move beneath boulders or pots, then lift them to throw at an enemy.

Surfacing launches Mina into the air and, when used well, allows her to cover greater distances than with her standard hop. Burrowing is central to Mina’s gameplay: it supports both exploration and combat, while also enabling her to unearth buried objects and discover secret treasure-filled locations.

A location regularly reached by burrowing is Mina’s Underlab, a safe haven where I could restore health, change trinkets and trade Bonestone to level up. It serves the same purpose as a Dark Souls bonfire, replenishing health-restoring items while reviving every monster in the area that I had previously defeated. Whenever you die-and you will-you leave behind an orb holding the bones you had gathered but did not spend before dying. Bones function both as item-buying currency and level-up experience. Mina reappears above the most recent Underlab visited, then must head back to reclaim that calcium-based currency.

Mina the Hollower is both exactly the sort of game I expected from the creators of Shovel Knight and, at the same time, something I did not. Yacht Club excels at selecting and blending old-school concepts, then giving them a fresh and appealing twist. I am pleased that the studio has not abandoned those qualities in favour of something wholly removed from the approach that made it such a major success over the past decade.

That success is partly rooted in bringing fans into the development process, then shaping and adjusting the game in response to feedback. The project has now been fully funded on Kickstarter. What has been released for the demo is an excellent proof of concept, and I would happily play it several more times to uncover every secret. The disappointing part is that delivery is estimated for December 2023, meaning the wait to get my hands on the complete game is likely to be agonising.

To watch Mina the Hollower in action, see both our New Gameplay Today and the complete demo playthrough without commentary.