“More” is a tricky concept in video games. We all want it, ostensibly: For games to go further, deeper, building ever larger virtual palaces and labyrinths for us to get our anxious brains lost in. As children, we never wanted the game to end, the sense of there being one more secret lurking around the corner to run out. Adulthood tempers that gluttony—not just because aging bones can spend less time hunched over a controller before worries like “sleep,” or “work,” or “my hands have frozen in this position” become paramount, but because we learn as part of the process of growing up that “more” isn’t automatically the same as “better.” It’s often just a synonym for “sloppy, but in a larger amount of space.”
Mina The Hollower, the new game from Shovel Knight studio Yacht Club Games, is an undeniable game of more. But it’s not the “more” of big-budget gaming excess, which pursues maximalism for the sake of infinite, idiot growth. It’s not even the “more” of a game like last year’s Hollow Knight: Silksong—which, as the sometimes blisteringly difficult follow-up to an indie team’s insanely well-received first effort, it resembles in certain key respects. Where Silksong weaponized “more,” though—drowning players in bigger numbers, bigger levels, bigger frustrations—seemingly for the sake of itself, Mina is a “more” of serious and significant consideration. It asks, “What if a game studio cared about every screen of their video game—and then just didn’t stop making them?” That sense of care and craft, which starts in the game’s confident intro, and then continues through more than 20 hours of secret-filled, monster-whipping playtime, is bracing and, if I’m being honest, occasionally exhausting. (This is not a “shut your brain off and vibe” kind of game.) But it speaks to what diligence and consideration can achieve, to the blessed triumph of giving a shit.
Mina’s aesthetics—whips, ghoulish monsters, twilight towns and forests—speak to Konami’s Castlevania series as a major reference point, but it doesn’t waste much time revealing its primary inspiration: Nintendo’s Zelda games, and specifically the three titles (Link’s Awakening, Oracle Of Ages, and Oracle Of Seasons) that the company released for its Game Boy and Game Boy Color handhelds in the ’90s and early 2000s. It’s there in the top-down perspective, in the game’s deliberately limited color palette and the slight stiffness of its controls, and most especially in its approach to secrets, which are hidden liberally around Tenebrous Isle, lurking in out-of-the-way corners, behind explicit and implicit puzzles, and, most especially, beneath its bone-strewn soil.
The titular Mina is, after all, a Hollower—the game’s term for archeologists possessing a mole-like gift for burrowing into the ground. Managing Mina’s digging (which lets her dive beneath the surface to move more quickly, avoid enemy attacks, and leap out of the ground for larger jumps) is a huge part of learning to play the game, and likely the cause of a few of a player’s early deaths. The rest will come courtesy of the game’s horde of rebels and undead monsters, who hit hard and move in unpredictable patterns designed to throw off any budding mastery of the game’s delightfully diverse arsenal of weapons. A few elements inherited from the endlessly influential Souls games—most notably weapon attacks that require careful timing windows to effectively deploy, and a healing mechanic that will send you scampering across the battlefield in hopes of finding a safe spot to imbibe life-restoring goo in—ensure that Mina can never drop her guard in her efforts to reignite the mystical power generators keeping Tenebrous alight. (Is there a dark secret lurking like six inches beneath the surface of her ostensibly positive endeavor? Suffice it to say that one of the few places Yacht Club wasn’t looking to refine its source material here was in its storytelling.)
Rather than let itself get bogged down in the endless quagmire of discourse surrounding difficulty in video games, though, Yacht Club has made the smart decision to give players tools to tune Mina’s difficulty up and down as ordered. Some of these in-game modifications are strict numerical considerations, allowing you to turn enemy damage higher or lower as suits your needs—but many of them are much weirder, inviting players to replay the game with increasingly odd modifiers like “the game changes color palettes every time you jump,” or “the screen gently rotates the entire time.” Sometimes, when developers add this kind of modularity, it can feel like they’re absolving themselves of the responsibility to balance their own games, but Mina’s base difficulty feels like it delivers an intended, well-thought-out experience, with considered arcs of punishment and lenience. And if you’re not enjoying riding the sine wave, you always have the power to make the game easier, harder, or simply weirder.
But while Mina’s combat and its attendant challenges can thrill, the real joy is in the exploration. Almost every screen of Mina has something hidden in it—a clever jumping puzzle, an interesting treasure, a silly little joke, or, often, some combination of all of the above. And unlike the Zelda games it lifts from, the game is less concerned with what tools players are hauling in their backpacks than in tricks and strategies that have accrued inside their skulls. Each section of Tenebrous Isle has some new obstacle or hazard players will need to learn how to make the most of, many of them interacting with Mina’s ability to mole her way through the ground. (One fairly late-game area, for instance, covers large portions of the playing field in glass floors that can’t be burrowed through, forcing the player to learn how to swap between navigating the realms both above and below the floor.) And all of these conundrums are delivered with the total confidence that players are smart and can figure this stuff out: Mina has a strong aversion to hand-holding that runs from its secret design all the way up to its fairly conservative philosophy on fast travel—because why let players skip over huge chunks of a game world that’s had so much consideration poured into it?
I’ll admit that there were times when I was playing Mina The Hollower that I could feel it wearing me down—when the endless knowledge that every new screen would test me in some way began to eat into my enthusiasm to push forward. But unlike, say, Silksong—where, despite the fluid care in its movement, the game often seemed to be putting more game in front of me out of an almost-rote desire for scale—this presentation of new challenges and tests never felt unconsidered. This is a game where you can feel the care the developers put into it with every tile placed, every gorgeous and giant boss monster designed, every “God, I fucking hate these bird enemies” elicited. It’s a game by and for people who think about the moment-to-moment experience of the games they make and play—and we can always use more of that.
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