Mina the Hollower may look like a cute and unassuming game at first glance, with its retro pixel aesthetic and demure mouse hero, but don’t be fooled. Developer Yacht Club Game has hidden myriad secrets within its world, the Tenebrous Isle, for players to unearth. And even after a week of scrutiny by eager fans, it seems many of these remain undiscovered.
“The playthroughs that we have been seeing, usually people are averaging around 50 to 70 percent item completion,” Mina the Hollower’s lead programmer David D’Angelo tells me, “which means they are missing 50 percent of the game”.
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Mina the Hollower – Official Launch Trailer. Watch on YouTube
“A lot of the stuff we are seeing more often are very surface level discoveries,” Yacht Club studio founder Sean Velasco adds. “People haven’t really, really gotten down to the meat of it. There are a few very secret things in the game.”
“Mina is not multiplayer, but it is community oriented”
Following Mina the Hollower’s launch last week, there’s been plenty of online discussion among players working their way through the cursed island, and Yacht Club says it’s noticed a real sense of community surrounding the game, despite it being single-player.
“Mina is not multiplayer, but it is community oriented,” D’Angelo says. “You might miss a bunch of stuff, and there are a lot of secrets, so you can communicate with your friends to help figure out things, or to find out where to go and what to do … there’s a range of ways you can play [the] game with each other that is exciting and fun, or alone, and I think at the end of the day, people just want to play good games.”
It already felt like Mina had secrets when I played the Switch 2 demo ahead of its release, and despite thinking I had done a pretty good job of sweeping up all there was to be swept, I realised I had missed loads when I watched a YouTube video of the same demo. So, of course, the full game has even more for me to (probably) not find.
“I just want to express gratitude to everyone for taking a look and giving us an amazing launch. The reception to it has been amazing,” Velasco says in closing. “Everyone in the office has been blown away. It is a really cool festive atmosphere here, and I want to really share that gratitude with you.”
Image credit: Yacht Club Games
We recently awarded Mina the Hollower five stars. “Here is a game that feels like an adventure,” Christian Donlan wrote in Eurogamer’s review. “It’s Zelda and it’s Bloodborne. It’s smacking bosses and reading the in-game newspaper. All of which is to say that those six years of design work are apparent throughout, in the complexity of the landscapes you travel, in the density of the secrets and the lore.”
For more, I also spoke with Velasco and D’Angelo about the game’s launch weekend, and why the studio opted for a modest $20 price point for Mina the Hollower.