Building a follow-up ♑to Shovel Knight must be a daunting task for Yacht Club Games. Over the last ten years the Blue Burrower has ascended from a classic side-scrolling send-up to an iconic video game character in his own right, and now the studio is embarking on a new journey to canonize a retro-inspired hero in Mina the Hollower. Director Alec Faulkner has proffered that if Shovel Knight is the studio’s Mario, then Mina the Hollower is its Zelda. After playing a chunk of the game at PAX East this past weekend, it’s hard to dispute that.
Mina has the look and feel of a forgotten Game Boy classic, and it wears its Link’s Awakening influence on its sleeves. But like Shovel Knight, Mina aspires to elevate a classic genre with modern mechanics and innovative ideas. It may be a while before Mina is ready - as is Yacht Club tradition - but if it can exec💝ute on its premise as well as it has in the past, the studio is going to have another classic on its hands.
Link’s Awakening is a good starting point for understanding Mina the Hollower, but it’s not the sole inspiration, and in fact Mina seems to be just as much inspired by Shovel Knight himself. A Hollower is someone that has been trained in the art of burro♕wing, and one of Mina’s abilities is to dive under the ground and pop out behind her enemies a la Bugs Bunny. I don’t know why Yacht Club has such a hard-on for digging, but I’m glad it does because it’s a fantastic mechanic. Just like Shovel Knight’s shovel, the burrow ability is both a platforming and combat mechanic. It is effectively a dodge that gives Mina i-frames while she dives, but it also allows her to traverse under barriers and walls to find secrets and explore dungeons. Burrowing increases movement speed, and upon exiting Mina flings herself forward farther and faster than she can with a normal jump. There’s a rhythm to borrowing, again just like using Shovel Knight’s sword to bounce, that’s simple to understand yet offers infinite complexity. If there’s one thing Yacht Club knows how to do it’s build an entire game around an exceptional mechanic.
Dodging and diving around enemies is fundamental, but Mina’s weapon options offer a lot of playstyle opt🥃ions. At the start of her journey you’ll choose between three weapons - a Castlevania-style whip, quick double daggers, or a heavy hammer - and you’ll need to stick with your choice for a while before you unlock the others. Eventually you’ll be able to freely swap between them every time you burrow into the safe room beneath a checkpoint, but you have to earn the flexibility. There are also sidearms to find - consumable sub-weapons you can equip and use up, as well as relics you can collect and equip that provide a wide variety of passive effects and extra powers. The coolest ones I found in my playthrough were an air dash and a spider companion that weaved webs beneath me anytime I stepped over a gap. The relics can be completely game changing, and ꦑjust like weapons that can be swapped on the fly any time you visit a safe room.
There’s RPG-like progression too, which brings us to Mina the Hollower’s other big influence: Bloodb𒉰orne. The developer assisting my gameplay session mentioned Bloodborne early on, and the longer I played, the more apparent the similarities became. Mina has a single-resource economy, bones, for purchasing items and buying upgrade points whenever she levels up, and if you die you lose everything you’ve collected until you get revenge on the monster that killed you. Shovel Knight has a similar death mechanic, but the risk/reward of hoarding bones to spend on incremental stat increases feels decidedly soulslike. Further, you can’t just heal Mina by drinking potions. You first have to deal damage to earn back segments of your health bar, and only once you’ve built the meter back up can you consume a potion to heal yourself. I didn’t experience much of the story, but I’m told that Mina borrows a lot of Bloodborne’s Lovecraftian themes too. Other games have aspired to be 2D Soulslikes before, but Mina is playing to the strengths of a lot of different genre conventions, and comes across as totally original as a result.
The game is difficult without being punishing, thanks to the checkpoint and resource-recovery system, but it still pushes you to learn enemy attack patterns, hone your reaction time, and be selective about the weapons and abilities you bring into battle. It’s familiar but fresh, which goes double for the art and presentation, which is every bit as impressive as Shovel Knight, and in some ways more so. The top-down perspective creates the opportunity for depth in ♕the environme🦄nt and complexity in the models that Shovel Knight couldn’t, and you can tell the artists are flexing the 8-bit skills even harder this time around.
I don’t know if Mina herself has as much potential to reach iconic status as Shovel Knight, and I didn’t 🎃get a real sense of the writing or humor from the scattered NPCs I met. But I saw enough to have faith that Yacht Club hasn&r🐲squo;t forgotten how to dig up classic genres and make them their own.