The best compliment I can give Mina is that playing it reminds me of the hours spend on my Gameboy playing Link's Awakening and Minish Cap as a kid, exploring dungeons and fighting bosses.
But Mina also reminds me of the time I spent playing Dark Souls as a teenager, crawling through environments filled with enemies, traps, secrets and shortcuts.
More than that, playing Mina reminded me of Metroid and Hollow Knight, and the hours I spent pacing through a spawling world searching for secrets, hidden paths, and breakable walls.
But Mina is very much its own game, filled to the brim with charm, effort, and attention to detail.
Details like an entire game manual available in the menu at any time, like you've bought the game at a GameStop with its original box. Or multiple newspapers you can read in-game, with news of your progress through the story and clues about what's happening in the world.
Mina is very clearly influenced by Zelda and Dark Souls and Metroid, but it's also much more than its influences. It's a love letter to video games, it's full of passion, it's fluid, intense, and dynamic, it's full of hidden paths and secrets, and it's simply a delight to play.
The game grabs you incredibly quickly : from the combat and movement which feel so fun and fluid to play with right from minute one, to the gorgeous pixel art and fantastic ost. The game is evidently chock-full of love and effort.
Mina also borrows something else from Dark Souls and Silksong : its difficulty.
The game is hard, and can be a little frustrating at times. However, I never felt stuck, I never felt out of options, and the game always felt pretty fair - I just needed to understand the patterns a little more and learn how to move correctly through the screen.
When the first difficulty spike hit, I simply farmed a little bit of money, bought a few upgrades, changed my loadout, and suddenly that spike smoothed over significantly. I have seen some discussion online about people getting frustrated with that very same spike I experienced, and I have to say I am a bit confused : do gamers just keep bashing their head over the same obstacles without trying a different approach?
Even if you still feel like the game is too hard for you to enjoy with some upgrades, Mina offers a truly staggering amount of modifiers and customization to craft the best experience for you. Reducing incoming damage, incresible invulnerability frames, negating fall damage... I don't think I've ever seen a game give its players the amount of control over its mechanics that Mina offers.
Another big reason for the combat feeling so good is the trinkets (which function similarly to Hollow Knight charms). The trinkets can change the gameplay so radically that you can develop an entire new playstyle depending on which one you've equipped, and you have a lot to choose from.
No, if I had criticism over Mina's difficulty, it would be the opposite : once you get to the mid-game, the game actually became too eays for my taste.
1. Too many plasma vials (= Estus flasks). The level design always makes sure you can return to a checkpoint pretty easily while avoiding monsters, and the plasma mechanic (you need to hit enemies for your Estus flasks to heal you) means you frequently die because you couldn't fill up your bar, not because you ran out of vials. It makes exploration a bit too easy, and not as exhausting and challenging as a Dark Souls.
2. Similarly, the game gives you too much money in the mid-to-late game. I had bought out every merchant in the central hub town with only 4 generators lit (out of 6). This made exploring less rewarding, and cheapened the money loss penalty.
3. In the same vein, the game gives you too many sparks (the mechanic that asks you to come back to the spot you died to avoid losing your money). At no point was I at risk of losing my money when I had 3 sparks or more. This makes the combat less interesting since I could pretty much facetank any monster without fear and spam attacks with no care for positioning.
4. It feels like the game is not prepared at all for you to actually get every collectible and upgrade. The final boss was a joke that I finished in a couple of tries, instead of an actual challenge, but that's because I had every HP and damage upgrade.
Now, I will admit, it is hypocritical of me to admonish players who get frustrated with the difficulty for not using the modifiers, only to then complain about the difficulty myself when I could have just turned on the modifiers to make the game harder.
My main point is that the difficulty is pretty inconsistent though the game. It starts really hard, but the more you progress the easier it becomes, which is a pacing issue I feel can be pretty damaging. If you wall off less experienced players right at the start, and then don't deliver on the challenge you promised to veteran players in the rest of the game, well...
Now, I know I just spent a lot of time complaining about the game, but it is entirely out of love. Mina is an absolute gem, one that hit me hard with nostalgy, but also did its own thing wonderfully.
I heavily recommand it to fans of old-school Zelda, fans of Castlevania, fans of Dark Souls, and fans of video games in general : Mina the Hollower is a must-play for me.
