Mina The Hollower Review Tracks 20 Hours of Zelda-Like Secrets
Mina the hollower turns 20 hours of play into a Zelda-inspired hunt for hidden systems, not just a nostalgia exercise. The review says the game starts with a shipwreck, then keeps pushing Mina across a world built around secrets, exploration, and maze-like dungeons.
Derek Yu’s 2024 rule
“Games are secrets, and secrets are games.” Derek Yu said that in 2024 while the reviewer demoed UFO 50, and the line hangs over this one as the clearest lens for reading it. Mina the Hollower is framed as Yacht Club Games’ ode to The Legend of Zelda, but the review treats it as something closer to a deliberate treasure hunt than a simple tribute.
The comparison set is specific: Link’s Awakening, the original NES Zelda game, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, and Castlevania. That mix places the game inside a narrow retro lane, where discovery, movement, and hidden routes matter as much as combat.
Ossex and Tenebrous Isle
Mina is a tinkering mouse who travels by boat to Tenebrous Isle to investigate why the generator towers she built there have stopped working. After crash landing on the shore and reaching the city of Ossex, she is pulled into a repair mission by Baron Lionel, who says Thorne, a rogue bat-soldier, has destroyed her handiwork.
The premise gives the player six doohickeys to recover from maze-like dungeons, and the review says the world is built from more than 1,200 intricately detailed screens. That scale is doing real work here: it signals a large handcrafted map built for roaming, backtracking, and picking apart corners that hide more than the main route.
Five weapons, four directions
Mina fights with one of five weapons and attacks in four directions, which gives the game a tighter, more old-school combat read than a modern action RPG. Her signature flail reaches enemies from a safe mid-range, while quick daggers, a hybrid gunsword, and a parry-capable shield widen the toolset.
Limited-use sidearms like flying axes and healing dashes add pressure to every encounter, because the player has to decide when to spend them. That push and pull fits the review’s larger point: Mina the Hollower is not just about reaching the next objective, but about working through a world that keeps hiding the next useful thing one screen deeper.
For readers deciding whether the game is for them, the review lands on a clear read: this is a dense retro adventure built for players who want search, routing, and mechanical variety over empty scenery. If you want a cleaner takeaway, it is that the 20-hour run produced evidence of a sizable Zelda-like, not a thin homage.
