Castlevania meets Zelda in Yacht Club Games' upcoming retro-style adventure
Yacht Club Games' newest, non-Shovel Knight project ambitiously combines retro Castlevania and Zelda elements, while forging its own fun-filled path.
We don’t usually cover crowdfunding campaigns, because there are so many and none can be guaranteed to fulfill their promises or to do so in a set timeframe. The right combination of sheer potential and the developer’s track record can lead us to make an exception, and that’s the case with Yacht Club Games’ Mina the Hollower.
Yacht Club Games’ first game, Shovel Knight, was also funded on Kickstarter. Not only did Shovel Knight successfully come to market, but it earned 4.5 stars and our Editors’ Choice award. That was at the game’s launch, before the developer added extra campaigns and stretch goals to flesh out the title even more. As it is now, Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove is one of the best side-scrolling platformers, retro or otherwise, ever made.
So, yes, I’m optimistic about Yacht Club Games’ ability to deliver on another crowdfunded project. That project is Mina the Hollower, and it aims to deliver a unique, overhead, action-RPG experience that faithfully evokes The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and Oracle of Ages/Seasons as much as Shovel Knight’s unique side-scrolling platformer experience faithfully evokes DuckTales and Mega Man. Yacht Club Games sent me a demo build to play on Steam, and I’m very impressed with what I’ve played so far.
Mina the Hollower follows an adorable mouse named Mina, who is a Hollower. Hollowers are geologist-adventurers who study the earth by burrowing under it. Mina is a particularly notable Hollower, because her research led her to invent the Spark technology that has enabled Tenebrous Isle’s prosperity. Now, the island is in danger, because the Spark generators that drive so much of it have been sabotaged, and Mina needs to fix them.
The adventure takes Mina to Tenebrous Isle’s far corners, delving into dungeon-like settings to repair the Spark generators and save the island. It’s a Legend of Zelda-like quest with a matching game structure and visual perspective. Mina traverses the island’s overworld to find dungeons, with each one filled with enemies, puzzles, and a boss protecting the broken Spark generator. This plays out in an overhead perspective that’s similar to the Game Boy Color Legend of Zelda games, complete with destructible pots, pits to jump over, and blocks that need keys to unlock them.
Mina is a different type of hero than Link. Yacht Club Games gave her a unique mechanic that informs how the dungeons are designed and how you play (just like Shovel Knight and his pogo-stick-like shovel). As a Hollower and a cute rodent, Mina can burrow underground. This lets her move very quickly under obstacles and enemies, making it a fundamental part of both combat and solving puzzles. Mina still needs to breathe, though, and can only hold her breath for so long before she has to pop out of the ground again. Since Mina moves faster by burrowing than by walking, exploring Tenebrous Isle involves a lot of diving into the ground, hopping out of it, and diving back down again. The action feels a bit unusual at first, but like Shovel Knight’s bouncing, it quickly becomes a natural part of gameplay.
Besides burrowing, Mina can jump into the air like Link can with the Roc’s Feather in the Game Boy Zelda games. She also swings a whip in one of four different directions, and can use a variety of secondary weapons like axes and knives for more flexibility when fighting.
If wielding axes, knives, and a whip sounds more like the tools of a Belmont than Link, that’s intentional. Tenebrous Isle is a setting with a distinctly horror-influenced vibe, and that extends to the action. Although there’s a Zelda-like perspective and game structure, the aesthetics and mechanics are much closer to Castlevania’s (with a hint of Bloodborne thrown in). There are spooky crypts, rotting zombies, and just as many whippable candles as there are smashable pots.
The Castlevania influence informs the game’s action, as well. Mina may be quick underground, and she can jump without a special item, but her combat agility is much lower than Link’s. She has a much longer reach than Link’s sword, but the trade-off is speed. Her whip shoots out after a quick wind-up, but the action requires a moment to recover before it can be used again. She gets knocked back further than Link when hit, too. This means that effective fighting requires careful timing and positioning, and consideration for when to best use sub-weapons based on the situation and how many resource vials are available for them.
Health-restoring roses are few and far between, but their scarcity is offset by a Bloodborne-like healing potion system. When injured, Mina can fill the missing portion of her life gauge with yellow, potential health by attacking enemies. She can then use a healing potion to turn that yellow into usable red health. It’s a combination of Bloodborne’s healing vials and its attack-based, health-recovery system.
Mina can also heal by entering her lab. Her health gets refreshed, but she still needs to smash objects and fight enemies to earn her healing potions back if she’s out of them. Each lab entrance serves as a checkpoint for when she is beaten, which leads to another Bloodborne/Souls element. Mina carries a spark that serves as a sort of extra life, and she loses that spark when she loses all her health. That spark can be recovered by killing the monster that beat her, but if she falls without a spark she loses all of the bones she has collected up to that point. Which brings us to the bones themselves.
As she burrows, breaks objects, and defeats enemies, Mina collects bones that serve as both currency and experience. She can give bones to merchants for items, or save them until they reach certain thresholds. After reaching a threshold, a level-up menu reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link pops up, and offers you a choice of improving whip power, sub-weapon power, defense, or banking a large number of bones as a crystal that won’t be lost if she dies without a spark. Once Mina spends bones on an upgrade or item, or turns them into a crystal, those resources are safe.
Mina can also collect trinkets from treasure chests and buy them from vendors to expand her capabilities. They’re accessory items that can offer passive or active benefits, like letting her burrow for longer or giving her more armor. She can only carry a few trinkets at a time and can freely swap them in or out at checkpoints, similar to the charms in Hollow Knight. Also like Hollow Knight’s charms, trinkets seem to be much more intended for mixing and matching based on personal play style rather than enabling the solving of specific puzzles or reaching specific locations like items in most Zelda games. There are a few movement-based trinkets that let Mina cross longer gaps than her standard jump, but they appear to only let her float or walk over two-tile gaps, which isn’t any better than a well-timed burrowing leap. Beating a boss also increases her maximum health, a Zelda standard.
Mina the Hollower clearly and lovingly takes influence from other games, but that doesn’t mean the game is derivative or lacks its own identity. After playing the demo, I can safely say that Mina the Hollower, like Shovel Knight before it, stands out as a unique experience that expertly evokes elements of classic games while establishing and maintaining its own look and feel.
The demo started in a simple tutorial section, a short dungeon with a handful of screens that let me get used to how Mina moves and fights. Here I learned about her walk speed and the faster burrowing mechanic. An overly aggressive slime monster taught me about Mina’s lengthy whip attack recovery and the value of spacing. A barrier showed me how to use burrowing to solve puzzles, and a locked block in a room with a crack in the wall that hid a key taught me to hit any object that looks out of place. These are all basic concepts fundamental to the game’s mechanics, and Yacht Club Games demonstrated them in this demo just as clearly, and without text prompts, as they did in Shovel Knight’s first level.
I left the tutorial dungeon and entered what seemed to be a bit of Tenebrous Isle’s overworld. At least, it was a few peaceful screens with characters I could talk to and no enemies to fight (though there are some hidden bones to find by digging and whipping). It established the spooky, gothic tone of the game, with a horse-man carriage driver standing in front of a large, closed gate that hinted at far more to explore in the future. As it was, I could only proceed in the other direction, which took me through a graveyard filled with dangers.
The game became more difficult at this point, with the introduction of clay torso monsters that quickly chased Mina and required several hits to defeat. Burrowing to dodge and maneuver around obstacles to get a chance to attack became vital for dealing with these enemies, especially when two appeared at once along with a swooping skeletal bird.
I eventually reached the crypt that served as the demo’s actual dungeon, and the challenge ramped up considerably. It was a winding gauntlet of enemies and obstacles, as well as floor spikes, rolling spike bars, and many, many pits to contend with on each screen. There were more clay monsters, along with a new enemy that looked like the lower half of a mannequin dancing around wildly. If allowed to combine, they got a long-distance whip attack of their own.
Besides finding keys, some puzzles required carrying statue heads to the statues missing them. Mina can’t attack with her whip while she’s carrying them, but she can at least throw the head at enemies. Actually, she needs to throw the head even if there weren’t any enemies around, because picking one up summons a green spectral version of the head that chases you from screen to screen, like Phanto in Super Mario Bros. 2.
I fought a boss at the end of the dungeon, and that was where I died the most in the demo. I had to break out of some Zelda habits I had adopted for boss fights like this, and really master Mina’s movement and attack speed, burrowing ability, and sub-weapons.
I beat the demo in 40 minutes, but only found half of the trinkets hidden in it. This wasn’t from lack of trying, either; I whipped and burrowed through everything I could find, and there were still secrets I didn’t find. This game is going to be dense with hidden screens and puzzles.
Mina the Hollower is hard, and that fact helps establish its identity. While every sprite is crafted with the overhead view of a Game Boy Legend of Zelda game, even faithfully keeping the four-color-per-tile limitation of the Game Boy Color, you won’t get the same quick, relaxed experience as those games. It feels like an overhead Castlevania game, and that’s impressive because there hasn’t ever been one before. It requires much more deliberate movement than Link’s Awakening or the Oracle games, and every aspect of the game is built around that requirement. You can’t just rush in and attack everyone on the screen; you need to observe, plan, and time your attacks.
This doesn’t mean it’s unfair, though. Mina’s actions are stiff, but responsive within the framework of that deliberate stiffness, and each screen and the movements of enemies are built around that. It increases the game’s challenge and encourages more strategic approaches to every screen, and adds to the horror-infused tension. Even while I struggled with breaking out of my Zelda habits, I didn’t get frustrated by repeated deaths; every mistake I made was something I could learn from, and not the result of bad controls or unreasonably difficult game design.
Mina the Hollower’s demo is a blast. The action was challenging but balanced, and clearly the secrets were satisfyingly well-hidden since I still haven’t found all of them. The Game Boy Color aesthetic is faithful and crisp, joining Shovel Knight’s NES-style graphics in looking retro but unique, and not simply copying the sprites of actual old games with minor adjustments. It also dripped charm, and the bit of Tenebrous Isle I got to see makes me excited about exploring the land, seeing its sights, and meeting its residents.
At the time of this writing, Mina the Hollower has raised $978,000, well past its $311,503 goal with eight days left on the campaign. As with Shovel Knight, the campaign is looking towards stretch goals, with $1,000,000 enabling three different starting weapons and $1,200,000 a fishing minigame. Digital copies of the game itself are available at the $20 level.
This is a Kickstarter campaign, so we won’t see Mina the Hollower available to play any time soon, and the final game will likely differ from this early demo. The estimated release date for Mina the Hollower is December 2023. Still, even this early in development, the game makes me think that Yacht Club Games is on track to deliver another Shovel Knight-level success. Mina the Hollower looks and feels great, and another two years will hopefully build it into another retro-style classic.
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Yacht Club Games' newest, non-Shovel Knight project ambitiously combines retro Castlevania and Zelda elements, while forging its own fun-filled path.
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Will Greenwald has been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over a decade, specializing in TVs, media streaming devices, headphones, game consoles, game accessories, and virtual reality. He’s reviewed well over 1,000 consumer electronics products and has written dozens of extensive guides to products in his fields.
His particular expertise is in TV and home entertainment technology. Will is a certified ISF Level III TV calibrator and THX Level I home theater installer, which ensures the thoroughness and accuracy of his TV reviews. In addition, he has also tested and reviewed every major game console and consumer VR headset of the last three system generations.
Will has been covering consumer technology for over 15 years. In addition to PCMag, his work and analysis has been seen in CNET, GamePro, Geek.com, Maximum PC, Sound & Vision, and other publications. He also enjoys fiction writing, photography, and building Gunpla model kits.
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