The Shovel Knight dev's new gothic action game has a demo that has awakened the GBA kid in me
Mina the Hollower speaks to me much louder than Shovel Knight ever did. Yacht Club Games' newest retro action game is basically Zelda with a mouse, and it's exactly the type of game a younger me would've played on my Game Boy Advance until the batteries died.
Yacht Club Games Kickstarted Mina the Hollower in 2022, raising over $1.2M, and today it's dropping a demo you can play on Steam before it fully releases on October 31.
From moment one, Mina the Hollower screams 2001 with a gloomy 8-bit kingdom sliding onto the screen and our mouse heroine poised to cleanse it of beasts in its intro. There's a little Castlevania in here and some Bloodborne too—which I'll get to in a second. Not much else is explained before you start a new save and wake up on a ship under attack by a leviathan.
I picked up two daggers and started slashing my way through monsters, hopping over obstacles and finding secret rooms on my way deeper into the cursed island it takes place on. There are throwing axes and other projectiles you can pick up that help take care of flying creatures, and Mina can burrow underground to avoid attacks. Burrowing can also get you past gates and underneath boulders to toss at stronger enemies, and a boss later in the demo hits so hard that burrowing becomes the best tactic to avoid getting your entire health bar shaved off.
Mina's health can be replenished by chugging a healing vial. Hear that? The FromSoftware alarms are going off. That mechanic works just like Bloodborne, where vials are a quick fix but you can also earn HP back by retaliating after taking damage. Mina the Hollower is also pretty tough like Bloodborne: Monsters dart around quickly and Mina doesn't have a dodge roll or anything to avoid them. There are checkpoints, at least, that let you spend the bones you collect from monsters and turn them into upgrades for your defense and damage.
The environments are dense with hidden passageways and ropes that lead to upper levels. In the 30 minutes I spent with the demo, I was stumbling into secrets all over the place. There's a list of tips in the menus and it mentions that after taking damage you can use your brief invulnerability to pass through harmful barriers, which tells me there will be lots of tricky spots to squeeze into in the final game.
And that is exactly the type of game I would play on my purple GBA as a kid. If it wasn't Pokémon, I was running around swiping at grass in A Link to the Past for rupees. Each level in Mina the Hollower is packed with so many things to break and climb and burrow under that I was spending more time poking at everything than actually making forward progress. It's just fun to see what's possible and where things lead, and the game doesn't hesitate to reward you for doing so.
The Mina the Hollower demo rules and is playable right now on Steam. Yacht Club Games says we'll get the full thing on October 31.