Mina the Hollower has been at the top of my wishlist ever since I first laid eyes on its gorgeous retro visuals that were so clearly inspired by the Game Boy Zelda titles. But developer Yacht Club Games, which previously made Shovel Knight, knows how to take that retro spirit in unusual directions, and by the devs' own estimation, the gameplay owes a lot more to the likes of Castlevania and Bloodborne than Zelda.
"Shovel Knight was our side-scrolling [platformer]," Yacht Club co-founder Sean Velasco tells our friends at newsletter Knowledge. "We wanted to do a top-down game that had different gameplay. I think many of us were thinking, 'If only we could be doing something a little bit different.' We wanted to go more fully into the RPG space and make something that had a lot more combat."
The visual inspirations for Mina the Hollower are pretty obvious if you've played the Game Boy Zelda titles, like Link's Awakening, Oracle of Seasons, or Oracle of Ages, and the devs aren't shy about touting that particular inspiration. But the expanded playfield of the game, which isn't limited to the square screen shape of the gameplay, created its own problems.
"We were looking at the Zelda Oracle games," Velasco says. "We tried not to go too far into 16-bit. The resolution of the game is so low; just the amount of tiles that you can fit on the screen on Game Boy was much smaller. We're widescreen, which makes it better. But it's significantly smaller than Shovel Knight, which is a problem because text doesn't fit and you can't just make it smaller. Mina is a game where everything is very tile-based. Our artists really struggled. If we get art and it's big, it's all got to fit in the tiles."
But in terms of how the game actually feels, it's not quite comparable to Zelda – which is pretty apparent if you've tried the demo. The combat is much more taxing than the simple sword and shield bashing of Game Boy Zelda titles, and you've got to make a concentrated effort to smartly position yourself against your enemies.
"You can burrow underneath enemies and hazards, and then you have this slow, methodical whip attack," Velasco says. "It's about getting that neutral space and playing it like a Castlevania or a Bloodborne – games that don't have a block [move], right? All we have is this jump, this burrow and this whip."
But while there is a comparison to be made to Bloodborne, don't expect Mina the Hollower to truly play like a Soulslike. "Even Doom has Dark Souls stuff in it," Velasco says, but while it seems like "every game has a parry now," Yacht Club is trying to build its own unique blend of old and new.
