Review – Mina the Hollower for Nintendo Switch 2

It’s always an exciting time when the developer of an indie darling gets to branch out into something new. Yacht Club Games, the creators of perhaps one of the most iconic indie games of all-time, Shovel Knight, had plenty to prove with their venture into a brand-new, non-Shovel Knight property, Mina the Hollower. Announced back in 2022 and hotly anticipated ever since, Mina the Hollower is finally ready to grace our screens. I’ve been able to spend the last few weeks playing Mina, courtesy of Yacht Club Games, and it’s done just about everything it can to impress me.

 

Burrowing In

 

You adventure through Mina the Hollower as the titular mouse with a penchant for digging (Yacht Club likes protagonists who dig, okay?), on a quest to restore Tenebrous Isle to its former glory. The Spark Generators designed by Mina are on the fritz, leading to unrest and destruction all across the island. On her way out to the island, the ship Mina is traveling on is attacked by a monster, sending it careening into the coast, and from there, Mina makes her way through the destruction to Tenebrous’s main hub of Ossex. It turns out that a rebellious faction led by Mina’s former ally Thorne, is raining havoc on Tenebrous and is hell-bent on stopping Mina from repairing the Spark Generators. Mina will have to make her way to every corner of the island — exploring swampy bayous, creepy crypts, frozen peaks, and more — to stop Thorne’s plans.

Mina’s main method of travel, besides walking, is burrowing her way around. Her abilities to dive and dig come in handy as you explore, as she can hop up in the air and then dive into the ground, burrowing for a short distance at a greater speed than she can walk, and can even “burrow” into deep water to swim for a short while. As she emerges from a burrow, Mina will perform a short hop into the air, allowing you to cross gaps you couldn’t cross with a normal jump or quickly approach, then attack airborne enemies as she surfaces from the ground.

 

 

Customizable Combat and Commuting

 

With these skills in hand, you’ll travel to the different sections of Tenebrous Isle to fix their Spark Generators, tall towers that provide power to each region, each guarded by a difficult boss. You’ll have plenty of weapons at Mina’s disposal to take down each boss though with five main weapons available throughout the course of your journey, plus plenty of secondary side-arms and equippable trinkets to help you switch things up. Mina’s vast arsenal was key to the enjoyment of my experience, both with combat and exploration. After I got rolling with my playthrough and had a handful of weapons, side-arms, and trinkets unlocked, I felt incredibly free to experiment and see what worked best for me. Tackling (and dying against) tough bosses became a lesson in experimentation – time after time I would tweak one or two things to find the best way to melt each boss’s health bar.

 

 

Most of your items come in handy outside of battle too, offering new or different ways to explore the various nooks and crannies of Tenebrous Isle. Early in the game I was keeping a watchful eye out for areas and openings I could burrow under to uncover secrets, but as I gained more items I found myself testing each one out for its movement capabilities just as much as its combat prowess. Certain side-arms can help you cross gaps or hit hard-to-reach switches, and there are trinkets that can offer better movement beyond what their description shows you. I spent a good few hours dealing with Mina’s slow swimming speed, clearing an entire swimming-focused area with careful planning and precise jumps before I realized that equipping a trinket that helps Mina move at a normal pace in long grass, on ice, and on wet surfaces also helps you swim faster if you have it equipped. Upon realizing this, I was happy to go back and explore plenty of areas where the watery gaps were just a touch too long to cross before Mina sank.

 

Magnetic Mysteries

 

It’s the way all these items can interact with each other and how you start to naturally notice and intuit their interactions as you spend hour after hour playing that is the true testament to the quality and depth of Mina’s design. Yacht Club has done an outstanding job by packing this game to the brim with secrets and puzzles, and it was a pleasure to make my way through each of them. There are basic puzzles like figuring out how to sneak your way past a bouncer to get into a music hall; and more complex puzzles like stealing a gorilla’s ladder and carefully tossing it around moving platforms in the bayou without losing it in the water so you can make your way to treasure. 

Plenty of puzzles will test your solving skills, and some embed themselves so well into the game’s identity you almost don’t realize there’s a puzzle to solve in the first place. Thankfully, none of them are too overwhelming or frustrating, bringing satisfaction out of even the toughest one. The same can be said of the combat, though a handful of bosses were able to contribute double digits to my death counter. Hints aren’t exactly in your face but they are fairly easy to come by, with in-game newspapers explicitly letting players know where to go next to progress the story, and offering other hints of what to look for to uncover secrets throughout the world. This is a game that is practically begging you to experiment and explore, and it will find some way to reward you for doing so – from the opening scenes all the way to the climax.

 

 

Tenebrous Isle is darkly charming, with a cleverly grim personality that drew me in at every turn. Rich color palettes cover the world, echoing Game Boy Color games of years past while turning it up a notch thanks to modern display technology. Mina’s slight steam-punk aesthetic is rimmed with touches of the macabre and whimsical, making for a unique setting as well. A setting where bones act as both currency and experience points (and in at least one NPC’s case, their actual bones), and animals, humans, ghosts, and more all feel like they fit right in. The music is top notch as well, setting the mood for every area and fight in a way that perfectly matched the visuals on screen.

 

A Sparkling Performance

 

The Switch 2 version of Mina the Hollower runs like a dream, easily running nice and smoothly at the offered 120 fps setting in both handheld and docked modes with popping colors throughout the game. Loading times may as well be non-existent in my experience. Thanks to this I found myself quickly spawning back at checkpoints whenever I died, making it super easy to run back to whatever enemy, obstacle, or boss managed to fell me in no time flat.

 

 

Far from Hollow

 

This is one of those reviews that was hard to write because I couldn’t pull myself away from the game long enough to write about it. I wanted to spend as long as I could exploring Tenebrous Isle and discovering all its secrets and surprises, and I’m excited to get back to it once I’m done writing. Yacht Club Games has outdone itself with Mina the Hollower, managing to craft a game that continued to draw me in the more I played it, leading me to while away the hours until I’d burrowed my way into every nook and cranny I could find.

 

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