Mina the Hollower, an adventure game about a technophilic mouse, reminded me, on a psychological and visceral level, why I loved playing the kind of games I did as a child. They left room for your mind to wander. Though Mina’s visual style pays homage to the Game Boy, which I never owned, it recalls a time when I found games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past irresistible.
Mina, by the studio that made Shovel Knight, draws inspiration from “The Secret of NIMH,” Victorian literature and 1990s role-playing games. It may appear utterly quaint to a more stimuli-ravaged brain.
But it hearkens back to an era before games aspired to anything like realism or offered plotlines suitable for adult-baiting TV adaptations. Mina’s world is whimsical, filled with surprising game mechanics and hidden locations that spurred me to scour every corner for secrets. (Try filching a ladder from a shopkeeper to reach otherwise impossible places.)
Though Mina has the steep dexterity challenges that made a friend of mine once quip that 20th-century designers must have hated kids, it also contains a notable array of options — infinite health, the ability to walk over pits, weakened bosses, etc. — to mitigate its default difficulty.
Mina the Hollower opens with the titular mouse standing on the deck of a ship reading a letter under a blood-red moon. The note is a request that she fix the six spark generators she created, which ushered in an age of industry and progress. It seems that because the generators have fallen into disrepair, an influx of monsters has come to the Tenebrous Isle and the city of Ossex.
When a kraken attacks out of nowhere, knocking several passengers overboard, Mina runs below deck to find a weapons chest containing daggers, a mace and a large hammer. Players can experiment with all three weapons before choosing one with which to face the monster.
David D’Angelo, the game’s lead programmer, said the premise — citizens have benefited from the generators by receiving power and light — could be understood as a parable. “They’re getting this amazing stuff for the first time, right?” he said. “The same way everyone loves, or lots of people, love A.I. And at the same time, you’re wrestling with the downsides.”
What is immediately noticeable about the opening sequence is that it doesn’t offer a blow-by-blow tutorial that explains to press this to attack, this to jump or this to perform Mina’s signature move: briefly tunneling underground to dodge and uncover items. (Gameplay instructions and a glossary of enemies can be found in an old-school manual within the menus.)
After fending off the kraken, the ship Mina’s on crashes into the shoreline. From there, Mina must make her way past gremlins, flying buzzard-like creatures called beebats and other nuisances. Mina’s journey to fix the spark generators will take her through a cemetery, a bayou, an autumnal farming village, a mining town, an alpine region and an astral plane.
“I wouldn’t say we’re trying to create nostalgia specifically,” Sean Velasco, the game’s director, said. “It’s like we’re trying to go back and take all of those ideas that we loved or that we thought had potential and then synthesize them into something new.”
Velaso added: “The best thing is that when someone plays Shovel Knight, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, I heard this game is based on something called Mega Man. And I went back and I played all the Mega Man games, and they were so fun.’”
D’Angelo said Yacht Club Games was interested in removing from their games the friction that makes dropping into old games somewhat forbidding. They do that by offering amenities like not having to deal with a 4:3 aspect ratio, D’Angelo said. But creating a Game Boy-like experience for modern audiences was not without its challenges. “The screen is small, but the world is huge, right?” D’Angelo said. “How do you merge that? That’s like a really weird concept nowadays.”
I mentioned that large game studios often positioned their creations as capable of going toe-to-toe with Hollywood while Mina the Hollower was happy to exist as nothing more nor less than a rock-solid game. Reflecting on the sense of discovery that games like Mina do well, Velasco said that joy comes from learning and then mastering the rules.
“You’re playing the game and you’re like, ‘What can I do? What can I do to this world?’ The rules of the game become clear to you through experimentation, which is a thing that only a game can do,” Velasco said. “I’m getting chills just thinking about it.”
Mina the Hollower was reviewed on the PC. It is also available on the PlayStation 5, Switch, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.
