Mina the Hollower PS5 Review. It’s tough to accurately put into words just how fantastic my time with Mina The Hollower has been; it’s legitimately rare for a game to have this strong of a pull on me. We’ve all said it before, but I was genuinely up into the wee hours just carrying on my adventure through Tenebrous Isle. Every aspect of Mina feels pruned to perfection, and designed to hook you from the outset.
If there’s any kind of praise that I can possibly heap, writing this review is one of the toughest challenges I’ve faced in a long time, purely because I just want to play more.
Mina The Hollower Review (PS5) – Something Truly Special Out Of Something Simple
A Well-Worn, But Unshakeable Foundation
In step with their last game, Shovel Knight, Mina The Hollower takes a classic aesthetic from the halcyon days of the handheld days of classic Zelda. An aesthetic that was largely a creative product of dealing with limitations of primitive hardware is pushed to dizzying heights that consistently impress. Shovel Knight proved that there was a lot of life left in a classic aesthetic, and Mina The Hollower does the exact same.
Beneath that style is a fantastically realised world, full of intrigue around every corner. Mina The Hollower follows the titular mouse as she travels to the Tenebrous Isle, to help repair the generators that she herself created and installed years ago to help bring prosperity to the isle. After being thrown into the sea and into the chaos of the isle, it’s clear that issues run deep, and there’s a lot more going on than just a few machines breaking down.
Perhaps blame me for underestimating the game based purely on style, but the depth in world-building and narrative left me pleasantly surprised, and was the primary reason I was being pulled head-long into the adventure. Mina The Hollower does anything but play to the status quo, with a world that feels uniquely gothic and miserable, in the best way possible. If you want a comparison point, think Bloodborne with a bit more of a population.
The Tenebrous Isle is a place full of strife and characters to discover, with details hidden in every book, and that makes everything else click into place.
Top-Down Brilliance
The homage to classic adventure games goes well beyond just aesthetic, being baked into the experience on a gameplay level. Mina The Hollower is a top-down adventure game, with real-time combat and distinct screen divides that split the world into distinct tiles. I’ve played plenty of games that have attempted to emulate this style, but this might be the first that borderline perfects it.
Forgoing the need for a map, the layout of the world in Mina is intuitive and driven almost entirely by clever in-game signposting rather than telling you where specifically to go. After a brief introduction to the world and your main objective, you’re almost chucked out and told to work it out, and I found that to be so incredibly refreshing. Even in the situations where I wasn’t necessarily pursuing the main objective, I was still finding worthwhile rewards and going through fun set pieces.
Mina’s standard moveset is bolstered by her characteristic “hollowing” ability, which lets her bury into the ground for a second or two before jumping out at higher speed. It’s a frenetic addition that quickens the pace of the average combat encounter into something far more than just walking up to an enemy and hitting.
With this baseline agility in mind, bosses are similarly designed to be fast-paced and a test of how you can move around the arena, just as much as you can throw damage out. This is supported by an innovative twist on the classic healing item, that takes more substantial notes from Bloodborne, encouraging active play rather than turtling.
By attacking enemies, you fill up a ‘plasma’ meter, that dictates how much health you heal when you use one of your limited vials of plasma. These vials replenish at every “underlab” you come across, essentially acting as a bonfire in souls-terms. Despite some clear mechanical similarities, this game is by no means a soulslike. I just think that this is the most compelling way of making consumables work for the player, aided by the risk reward of a potentially bigger heal to stave off death.
The Adventure Is Yours
Mina The Hollower isn’t the easiest game I’ve played in years, but it’s by no means on par with something like Bloodborne or similar games. It’s a healthy challenge that feels particularly pruned to be manageable yet still engaging. There’s an emphasis on expression that feels closer to Hollow Knight than a soulslike, with the trinket system. These range from additional firepower, to quickening how fast you heal, and acting as a second chance before death.
There’s a staggering amount of variety here, and discovering them came naturally as the result of small side quests or side-jaunts into the greater world, off the critical path.
In addition to this, Yacht Club Games has gone down the Celeste route and included a modular selection of “modifications” that allow you to tune the game to your taste, removing mechanics that might frustrate certain players more than others.
On the flipside, there are plenty of modifiers to make the game more challenging. Increasing the amount of damage that you take from attacks, reducing the amount of checkpoints around the world, making it so that your healing is generally less effective. All of these options exist to make the game suit you, which is great fun on return playthroughs.
For the sake of this review, I pretty much stayed away from the modifiers other than to look; I’m not the type of person to really indulge in these kinds of things, but it’s a refreshing change for developers to include features that would normally be up to fans to implement in a PC release, for console players out of the box.
Bearing in mind that this is the same team behind Shovel Knight, and it all starts making a bit more sense.
A Bonafide Looker
Aesthetics aren’t usually something that I double down on during the review process. Which isn’t to say that I don’t notice, but it’s rare that a game’s look and sound captures me so hard that I feel compelled to dedicate an entire section to just that, but here we are. Mina The Hollower is one of the most incredible games that I’ve seen, and heard, in the last decade.
Visually, the game makes the absolute most out of an incredibly simple foundation that is mesmerising to lose yourself in. The central city of Ossex is grim, miserable and full of character that throws me back to some of my favourite settings of classic RPGs, supported by one of the very best soundtracks that I’ve heard from a game of this type.
I’ve always had a soft spot for chiptune soundtracks, but this one takes the cake. There wasn’t a single one that had me turning the volume down, I had my headphones fully up and soaking in the dripping atmosphere of the Tenebrous Isle.
Lighting Can Strike Twice
If it wasn’t already clear, I think Mina The Hollower is a truly special game that deserves attention from anyone who loves the classics. It feels like the type of game that you hear stories about from an age long-gone, from people who incessantly talk about how great things used to be, only it’s here now.
Mina The Hollower is a fine-tuned adventure that will absolutely join the hallowed halls of greats, and will be likely revered as an all-time great, at least by me. It’s legitimately rare that I’m able to be as positive about a game as this, and it’s equally rare for a game to be this engrossing that it actively makes me want to put off doing anything else just to play more.
If you do nothing else this month, play Mina The Hollower.
Mina the Hollower is out now for PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.