Long in development and delayed since last October, Mina the Hallower will be finally available at the end of the month. The first big game from Yacht Club Games after their longstanding hit franchise Shovel Knight is a true love letter to 8-bit action adventure games, expanding upon the gameplay standards set by Zelda and its ilk delivering a huge, challenging retro-inspired adventure.
Playing as the titular Mina, a mouse with a brilliant mind, it’s your mission to scurry back to a cursed island where a revolutionary invention of hers has gone haywire. As a hallower and an inventor, she’s able to borrow underground and make use of an arsenal of weapons and powers, which she’ll definitely need in order to survive the terrible ordeal ahead of her.
Mina the Hallower isn’t an easy game by any stretch in its initial difficulty setting. Yacht Club Games has done a tremendous job at setting the stage for just about every kind of player in this regard though, by introducing a number of settings that are at your disposal from the very start in order to set the game to your liking, whether to make it easier or even harder on yourself, which include added hurdles or crutches to meet your needs.
With those, the game shifts and becomes a different experience than its core version. Without any changes, however, I found Mina the Hallower quite a challenge, especially at the outset. The protagonist can only take a few hits before going down, and considering the sheer size of the world, running back and forth through it can be intimidating, even more so considering that there’s no map to keep track of your position.
Yacht Club made a particular claim in regards to this omission, saying that they have designed the world to have landmarks and points of interest to help you make your way through without needing a map, and in that they sorta got it right, even if in my natural mindlessness, I still managed to get lost in the game. Thankfully, there are structural signposts in the form of newspaper articles, dialog, and literal signs that help point towards the next objective at opportune moments. And all things considered, in exploration games like this, it’s especially fun to get lost in them most of the time anyway.
The actual point of contention, though, came in the form of movement and combat. Mina is noticeably slow getting around while not underground, and even when she is burrowing, it’s not for very long. With the enemies’ much quicker and reactive attacks and positioning, the game quickly puts you in the role of prey, requiring you to be mindful of all of the skills at her disposal in order to make it through in one piece. By defeating them, you acquire the main currency in Mina the Hallower, bones, with which you can buy new items, but most importantly, upgrade one of your character’s four core stats.
However, if you die, in true Dark Souls fashion, you’re forced to “corpse run” in order to get your cash back, and some of these can be quite long, considering the general placement of the checkpoints, which not only reset all of the opposition in the world, but serve as Mina’s base of operation, allowing her to change her loadout and use other facilities. It makes it so every attempt your gains are always on the line, even more so if you, like me, decide not to make use of any of the aforementioned preloaded toggles. Like Shovel Knight with its destructible checkpoints, Mina the Hallower is the type of game that lets you “torture” yourself as much as you want, and for the most part, it’s all the better for it.
When it comes to providing a very retro-inspired videogame experience, there’s no one that can top this studio when it comes to their games. Mina the Hallower is absolutely gorgeous in its pixelated presentation, showing off beautiful sprites, colorful backdrops, and masterful animation, resulting in a game that in similar fashion to last year’s Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, could very well fit among the very best GameBoy Color had to offer. And that’s not even getting into its soundtrack, which is *chef’s kiss* all throughout, unsurprisingly, after Shovel Knight’s.
All in all, Mina the Hallower is bound to scratch people’s itch for challenging adventuring. Whether they’re looking for a juicy challenge to sink their fangs into or a beautiful, easygoing nostalgia trip, this one has it all going for it. Yacht Club Games surely took its time cooking it up, but it was definitely worth the wait.
