Mina the Hollower Review

Mina the Hollower is what happens when a studio that already nailed one homage decides the next one should be harder. Yacht Club builds it on the shape of a Game Boy adventure, a top down map drawn in a deliberate limited palette, then hangs a combat system on it that owes more to a souls game than to anything that ever ran on a handheld. Mina attacks in four directions with a whip and she burrows, dropping under the floor to slip a blow and surfacing where the enemy is not, and the entire fight economy runs on knowing when that window opens.

Bosses are the proof. Each one is a pattern to read rather than a bar to grind down, and the game is content to kill you while you learn it. Exploration is built the same way. Regions open sideways instead of in a line, currency comes back to a hub for upgrades, and the trinkets and sidearms you collect change how a room reads rather than raising a number. The complaints are consistent and worth stating.

The game explains almost nothing, several important mechanics are buried in an options menu instead of taught, and the assist settings that would carry a struggling player are tied to switching achievements off, which is a strange way to treat the people who need them. The art is the other headline, with splash screens on every new region that reviewers have not stopped bringing up. Story is the mildest part, a gothic errand with charm rather than weight.