When Mina the Hollower was revealed as the successor to the delightful Shovel Knight I was less than thrilled. It was pitched as a lil bit GameBoy Zelda, Castlevania, and of course, Bloodborne. What bothered me was the core mechanic of burrowing underground for a limited amount of time as a way of dodging and initiating attacks. This just seemed like a variant of dodge rolls, which I might describe as a scourge on modern 2D games. Put simply: the dodge roll was born from 3D games because player positioning precision is much weaker due to the nature of the camera, so 3D games generally have to rely more on timing as the core pillar of the game. Backporting this to 2D games functions well enough, but it's also wasting the actual advantages of 2D. So Mina just seemed like another 2D game ignoring the strengths of the form. With the final game my fears ended up, somehow, both confirmed and denied.
Burrowing is decidedly not a dodge roll. It has enormous wind up, so using it to react to things pretty much just means getting hit. There's also a ton of things that can still hit you while burrowing, so it's not exactly invincibility (the game actually kind of front loads this type of damage which just led to me underutilizing it early on even though across the game most things don't actually penetrate it). And, obviously, the fact that you're popping up at the end of it means the precision element is still in play. Yet I still kind of hated the combat. Frankly, I need to study it more to understand why. I would say it's primarily the big enemies and certain bosses that kind of look like the type of enemy you expect from a Souls game with lots of attacks and lots of movement that put you in the mindset of waiting for an opening and exploiting it, but I kind of found them somewhat unreadable and rather suspect the intended approach is more just burrowing towards them at an opportune moment. Some people point more towards just not liking 4-directional 2d melee combat, but uh, I adore it. This kind of thing was my favorite genre at one point (Mina is clearly more Crusader of Centy than it is Zelda). So I kind of just think Mina's combat is just kind of bad actually. I can point to certain things like the lighter weapons having pushback on the player and that feels terrible. But I'm not quite able to pinpoint the exact problem just yet. The game is so nearly flawlessly executed almost everywhere else that the flaws are just that subtle, I guess.
The less subtle flaw is just the game's take on Souls brand difficulty. I know a few people who bounced off Demon's Souls / Dark Souls and took a few years before they could get into them. I could never relate to these people. After playing Mina the Hollower, I finally relate to them. My first 4-5 hours with this game were pretty miserable (technically the first hour tutorial level was delightful, it's more when you get dumped into the world). Part of that was just that I wasn't in the right mindset for a game that dumps you into a central town with a billion NPCs. But mostly the game's early difficulty just comes off as wrong. The early game part of a Souls game feels like a slow, satisfying climb with the game teaching you lessons and getting the scraps required to build yourself up. Mina's difficulty by contrast just comes off meanspirited. You don't feel like you're clawing your way up, you feel like you're getting kicked in the face.
The biggest element like this is the potion system: to heal you need to not only have a potion, and deal with a lengthy drinking animation, but you also need to have charged up that potion by hitting enemies (and said charge is also lost when you get hit). Yeah, it's inspired by Bloodborne, but that game still had alternative healing options (admittedly maybe too generous of ones). While this system is harsh in combat, it's kind of just a dick when dealing with traps because there just aren't any enemies to use to power up your potions. It's not uncommon to get in a situation where you have full potions, but still end up dying on traps because said potions are useless paperweights (admittedly this system starts to make sense in the late game when you're swimming in enough potions to tank a lot of traps, but it feels terrible in the early game). Similarly, when you die you lose your subweapon and all ammo, which pretty much just led to me not really using them because whether I had them or not was completely unreliable. And finally the classic Souls drop your money on death mechanic is here too, except you drop an orb instead and only lose all of your money when dying without an orb. I think this was intended to be less harsh than Soul's approach, but it ends up being much harsher in the early game since enemies have a high rate of absorbing the orb and it doesn't really let you get the orb and get out, and then absurdly soft in the late game when you're swimming in orbs.
The turning point is that pretty much everything I laid out above and more can be circumvented to some degree or another by using the trinket equipment system that grants various mostly-passive buffs, unlocking weapons that suit you better, and a few other forms of upgrade. It's pretty flexible such that whatever part of the game is kicking your butt probably has a trinket or three for making it easier. As a result, after the first dungeon I started having a pretty good time and by the third I was just straight up plowing through certain enemies using my face instead of my brains.
A game with brutal difficulty that rapidly turns trivial with some upgrades might sound terrible, but the reality is that the more intense combat isn't really the bulk of the game anyway. The majority of it is more exploration, overhead platforming that feels really good, dealing with trap rooms, and just a dab of puzzles and narrative. The game has a ton of variety where it shakes up the enemies, traps, and other gimmicks every few rooms. There's a couple auto scrolling sequences where you really have to weave the platforming with combat on some of the simpler enemies and again it just feels really, really good. The soundtrack is similarly excellent with the same energy as Shovel Knight as well. I will say that since the game is far more action oriented rather than an even action/puzzle mix like Zelda with lengthy dungeons, I did end up playing it mostly in one hour chunks. I think it works excellently in short bursts, though, since the dungeons are pretty linear so it's easy to pick it back up.
The narrative revolves around the titular Mina returning to an island where she installed experimental power generators that rebels have shut down, decrying them as killing the planet. The goal is to reactivate all of them for the philanthropist ruler of the island, but you probably already know where this is going just from the plot summary. You can do the dungeons in any order so the main plot kind of just inches along to its inevitable conclusion and it doesn't really bother to give much reasonable doubt as to what the generators are actually doing along the way (though the real meat of the story is just all the NPC's problems along the way and the surprisingly dark humor). Despite it all, the ending ends up going so hard that it actually becomes a highlight of the game (perhaps overindulgent with nods to other games, but some of them are executed so well that it's easy to forgive).
So should you play Mina the Hollower? Yeah. Yeah you absolutely should. It might be a really painful start, but like so many games it does, in fact, get good later. In some ways I've actually grown fond of its blemishes. Not in terms of coming around on the choices made, I still think they're awful, but because in other areas the game almost feels over polished from its luxurious development time and staff size. The fact that there's a little bit of dirt in there gives it some character instead of feeling hollow.
