Mina the Hollower Preview: Kinda Like Bloodborne as a Cute 8-Bit Adventure Game

Mina the Hollower hooked me, cementing its hold during a fight with a giant animated statue called the Duchess. Mastering the hammer’s charged swings, I depleted her first health bar, forcing her to sprout tentacles that burrowed under the arena floor before erupting where I stood. I died a few times, but by the fourth or fifth try, I grasped her patterns. I read her tells, strafing and dodging instead of squaring up, landing charged hits when she committed to an attack. Finally defeating this monstrosity with a glimmer of health remaining, I felt like I was releasing a massive weight, like I could finally breathe again. This fight encapsulates Mina — punishing at first, but only until you get the rhythm down, and then deeply empowering. During my preview, I repeatedly lost and reclaimed thousands of bones (like gold from Shovel Knight, souls from Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, etc.), grinning with each new mechanic discovered or hidden side area uncovered along the way to the next big leveling milestone. After hours with the early game, which reminds me of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening crossed with Bloodborne, I can already say Mina the Hollower has cooked up something special.

Burrowing, or “Hollowing”, is Mina’s signature move. To initiate a burrow, simply long-press the ‘A’ button (normally used for jumping); your mouse-shaped protagonist then dives into the dirt. She remains invincible against regular melee attacks for the duration of this burrow, eventually popping out a beat or two later in a small puff of dust once the ability’s energy is depleted. This versatile move allows Mina to move around the world, evade powerful attacks, and even solve puzzles or enter new areas through small enclosures.

Movement and combat are deeply embedded in the design of every part of the world you inhabit as Mina, which is why it’s great that she also wields a selection of weapons, chosen at the campaign’s outset, rather than being limited to her canonical Nightstar whip. Though earlier coverage suggests the Nightstar (which can uniquely pull armored enemies out of position) is her main weapon, I personally barely touched it and didn’t choose it past the tutorial. My preference was for the heavy Blaststrike Maul hammer. Yet the dual blades, Whisper and Vesper, offer a markedly different, more versatile combat experience with their fast strikes, making Mina feel agile and dynamic for the short duration I tested them out.

The Blaststrike Maul, by contrast, is much heavier, slowing Mina down as she charges her attacks. This is where hollowing becomes a crucial wildcard, maintaining mobility between longer attack cycles. Together, these abilities create a moveset that constantly presents a tactical choice: commit to an attack, or disappear under the floor to reposition for a better angle? You can even chain a burrow directly into an attack, watching an enemy swing at empty air before you pop up behind them to deliver a decisive blow. Just watch out for enemy attack patterns and stay wary of treacherous hazards that the world itself can throw at you, like lava that makes it impossible to burrow.

No Bones About It

Bones are the engine that drives Mina the Hollower’s entire economy, and they’re doing double duty as both currency and experience. You spend them at the blacksmith to upgrade your gear, you spend them at the trinket store to round out your build, and you scoop them up off corpses every time you whip an enemy into oblivion. The hook is that they’re also fragile — if you die out in the field, your entire stockpile drops at the spot you fell, including any new bones you earn while trying to fetch it, and (at least, early on) you’ve got exactly one chance to fight your way back and pick them up. Die a second time before reaching them, and they’re gone for good.

The thing is, early on, those losses really do sting. I remember dropping a roughly 2,000-bone payday on a careless retreat through Queensbury Crypt, only to eat it on the return trip when I got cornered between a pair of massive, disembodied mummy legs and an arrow trap. I sat there staring at the death screen for a second, genuinely bummed out. But a few hours later, that same number would’ve barely registered, because, delightfully, the bone economy scales with you; enemies in newer zones drop bigger piles, you can blow your way through bigger swarms of foes, and what feels like a catastrophe in the opening hours starts feeling more like an inconvenient tax by the time you’ve gotten your bearings. It’s a smart bit of design.

Plasma is the other resource you’ll learn to master, Mina’s version of an Estus Flask — a small, refillable healing reserve you must ration carefully in the early game before finding upgrades and trinkets that expand it. I died frequently in the first couple of hours, largely because I kept misjudging my plasma reserves, using it on minor damage only to find myself empty-handed when a real fight began. Learning to conserve it is half the early game, a skill that improves independently of leveling up.

Part of the strategy involves generating plasma during a fight by filling a meter on the bottom of the screen before your plasma vials can heal you effectively. This means dealing significant damage first, then finding a quiet place to activate a heal. The heal itself can take up to three seconds to complete, leaving you immobile and vulnerable.

Whips and Wallop

I’ve already mentioned that I bounced off the Nightstar whip pretty quickly, but the real story of Mina the Hollower’s combat is that there are seemingly five weapon types in total, and you can swap between them at the blacksmith in Ossex City whenever you’ve earned enough bones to make the trade. Each one fundamentally rewires how you approach a room. The Blaststrike Maul I’ve been playing with is slow and committal, demanding that you read enemy tells and reposition with Hollowing rather than out-DPS them. The dual blades Whisper and Vesper are the exact opposite, prioritizing fast, mobile strikes and chained attacks over heavy single hits. There’s also a shield in the mix — which I acquired through a duel with the blacksmith’s brother, an unexpected little narrative beat that triggered the moment I tried to buy it — and shield play feels like its own whole thing, all parries and counter-windows.

The weapon I had the most fun experimenting with outside of the hammer was the Battery Buster, an electric firearm that swaps between two modes when you tap the right trigger. One mode is a melee swing that builds up electrical charge with every hit. The other mode dumps that charge into a blaster that fires bouncing electric bolts that ricochet off walls and clip multiple enemies at once. It’s a satisfying loop: melee enough to build up your charges, switch, empty your mag into the big boss across the room, or watch the bolts pinball around a room full of armored enemies and clean them up in a single burst. I haven’t tried every weapon yet — there’s at least one I haven’t even unlocked — but I’m already plotting a Nightstar-only run on a second playthrough just to see what changes.

Trinkets are the second leg of the build stool, and they’re where Mina starts to feel like a proper RPG underneath the action-adventure trappings. You’ll find them stashed in chests, sold at the trinket store, or handed to you as rewards for helping the world’s inhabitants, and each one grants some kind of passive effect — items like the Iron Lung, the Pit Preserver, and Flybait offer tweaks to your plasma reserves, your burrow time, your ability to walk on spikes, and a dozen other systems. You’ve only got a handful of equipment slots to fill, so building a loadout becomes a real puzzle, especially once you start finding trinkets that enable specific playstyles. I spent a not-insignificant amount of time in menus before I realized I was actually enjoying it.

Ossified Appeal

The world of Mina the Hollower is where the whole package really comes together for me, because Tenebrous Isle is one of the most flavorful little spaces I’ve explored in a 2D adventure game in years. It’s a 1700s Gothic horror setting dressed up with anthropomorphic mice, birds, humans, and the occasional shuffling undead — and Ossex City, which serves as your central hub, is this layered little ant farm of merchants and side quests and tin-can-kicking children and crate-hauling workers, all going about their day under a sky that looks like it’s about to pour. I accidentally unlocked a pawn shop that lets you sell off trinkets and weapons you’ve outgrown. And then I helped a writhing mass of flesh become a real boy again. There’s a key shop run by an NPC who’ll challenge you to find every hidden key in the game — and, if you’re not the completionist type, will also just sell them to you outright if you’ve got the bones. Hilariously, there’s even a ghost willing to race you across town on the condition that you never touch a single staircase along the way.

None of this is mandatory. All of it is the kind of stuff I kept finding myself doing instead of pushing forward on the main quest. If Fable, Bloodborne, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening had a Game Boy Color baby, Ossex City would be the town it grew up in.

The presentation is doing a huge amount of work, too. The pixel art holds rigorously to four colors per tile (a nod to the original Game Boy Color or NES’s actual hardware limitations), but the framing is widescreen, the animation is detailed enough to give every character real presence, and Jake Kaufman’s score absolutely sells the moody, Gothic-pastiche vibe of the whole thing. The soundtrack on its own would be worth a recommendation.

The pacing trick that ties the story together, though, is the hunt for each of the seven Spark Towers. There are seven of them scattered across the island, and reactivating each one is the main thrust of Mina’s overarching plot — but more importantly, they’re absolute treasure piñatas. The first one I unlocked sat at the end of the Queensbury Crypt (the area you’d reach after getting through the early game’s opening stretch), and it played out as a vertical mini-dungeon where I had to outrun cascading electric surges climbing up the side of the tower while scooping up bones and clobbering enemies along the way. When I finally hit the top, Mina dumped thousands of bones into my pocket along with a fresh trinket and an equipment upgrade I’d been scrimping for. I haven’t reached the rest of them yet, but if they’re all paced like the first one, the structure of this campaign is going to be one of its biggest strengths.

Mouse Trap

A quick word on the technical side. I ran my preview build on a 3440×1440 ultrawide monitor, and while Mina the Hollower runs perfectly fine at that resolution, I actually preferred playing it windowed at 720p — the pixel art just looks more like itself at a smaller scale, and I’d bet money that its retro vibe is going to feel best on a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch. A controller is also mandatory in spirit if not in practice — the button layouts are tactile and responsive in a way that keyboard play won’t really match, and Yacht Club has clearly designed every input around a D-pad and four face buttons.

My one real complaint after several hours is that there’s no in-game map. I trust myself to read level layouts in most adventure games, but Tenebrous Isle is large enough and interconnected enough that I found myself feeling a little untethered once I got out of the opening areas. Maybe that’s the intent — there’s definitely a “get lost on purpose” vibe to a lot of the exploration — but a basic map would’ve gone a long way.

But hey, at least the options menu is generous with assist modifiers. Want to jump higher? Walk twice as fast? Burrow twice as fast? Take 1.5x damage for a real challenge? Turn off combat damage entirely so you can just explore? It’s all there, along with a bunch of pre-built Combos that bundle modifiers into easier, harder, or just plain weirder configurations. I didn’t end up using any of them on my first playthrough, but I’m thrilled they exist — they feel less like a basic difficulty toggle and more like a toolkit, and they’re exactly the kind of thing that should be standard in every game of this style.

If you grew up playing NES games, Game Boy games, or similar games from that era — if you remember spending an entire afternoon stuck on a single screen until you figured out the trick to moving forward — Mina the Hollower is aimed squarely at you. I’ve still got plenty of questions about the back half of this thing, but after several hours with the early game, I’m fully hooked and am prepared to blast through the rest without stopping to ask when it drops on all platforms on May 29.