After years of building Shovel Knight’s world and characters through expansions and side adventures, developer Yacht Club Games is finally ready to create something that has nothing to do with digging heroes. . The studio is on Kickstarter again to fund its latest project Mina the Hollower, in which there is a mouse protagonist with a familiar tendency to move the land. I’ve spent quite a bit of time practicing the game’s demo, and while it’s a very early vertical slice, my first adventure with Mina offered a tough but promising look at what’s going to happen next. What games can finally be in the store.
Like Shovel Knight’s 8-bit homage to games like Mega Man, Yacht Club proudly carries its inspirations up its sleeves. With a top-down camera, muted colors, and intricate pixels, Mina looks like she’s ripped from a long-lost Game Boy Color cartridge. It’s like one, with crunchy chiptunes providing a tranquil atmosphere for Mina’s exploits. The world reminds me of Link’s Awakening, traveling through a grid of screens, solving puzzles and defeating creatures like zombies, blobs, and giant giants. However, Mina’s combat prowess takes longer from Castlevania, knocking down enemies with a quick whip swing and using secondary weapons known as Sidearms like Volt Hatchet’s or Gyro-Dagger’s vaulting. . Like Castlevania, using Sidearms comes at the cost of Joules, a resource that needs to be replenished with potions.
Combat is fun and inspires creative use of attacks and mobility, but can also be ruthless in its difficulty; sometimes there is a strategy, but not exactly for others. I find myself dying for obvious mistakes I’ve made, while other times I feel like I’ve lost control of the situation in unfair ways. This is an early concept of what Yacht Club is looking to implement with the full Mina experience, so I’m not worried about some of the rough edges. The demo presented a lot of interesting and unique scenarios that I loved while struggling to survive. Equipable jewels ease the difficulty by increasing attributes like health or attack power. The demo started me off with four, and six more tucked away in the gothic landscape.
As a Watcher, Mina is able to dig deep in the ground, passing through dirt faster than she can walk on. By pressing and holding the jump button, I can move across the ground, dodge enemies to set up attacks from a safer location, or maneuver under rocks or pots to pick up to throw at the bad guys. . The levitation from the ground also causes Mina to rise into the air, and if used correctly, can help her fly further than her default jump. This burrowing mechanic is at the core of Mina’s gameplay, benefiting in combat and clearing, but also helps unearth buried items or locate hidden areas full of treasure.
One area frequently accessed by burrowing is Mina’s Underlab, a sanctuary where I’ll recharge my health, trade jewels, and cash for Bonestone to level up. It’s the equivalent of a bonfire of Dark Souls, allowing my health-healing items to replenish and reset all monster threats in the area I’ve previously deployed. Whenever you die (and you will), you’ll drop an orb containing bones – the currency used to purchase items, as well as level-up experience – you’ve collected and failed before death. You will respawn above the last Underlab you visited and start retrieving the calcium currency.
Mina the Hollower is both something I expected the creators of Shovel Knight to do, but at the same time it didn’t. The Yacht Club is a great place to combine old-school ideas and add a new, inviting flair. I appreciate that they didn’t overlook these aspects and look for something completely different from what has made the company so successful over the past decade. Part of that success stems from getting fans involved in the development and drawing and adapting feedback as development progresses. Currently, the project is fully funded on Kickstarter. What was provided for us to demo was such a great proof of concept that I wanted to play it a few more times to find out all the secrets. The bad news is that the shipping estimate is set for December 2023, so getting me a finished game will certainly be a long wait.
To see Mina the Hollower in action, check it out New game today and play through full demo with no comments.
