Mina the Hollower, Dark Souls, and Difficulty
Mina the Hollower, the Castelvania flavored Link's Awakening styled game from the developers of Shovel Knight is finally out, and people are both freaking out about how hard it is, and comparing it a lot to From Soft games. The comparisons do merit making, and it is absolutely a game that's going to kick your teeth in when you first start playing, but I think the lens you really have to look at it through is that this is a game from the same developer in the same headspace as Plague of Shadows.
I'm kinda surprised that that's the case honestly. I had a chance to talk to the developers a while during a slow moment in a big anniversary marathon stream they were running, and they seemed frankly traumatized by how people reacted to the first Shovel Knight... sequel? Whatever we're calling them. It is, of course, the one where you play as Plague Knight, who like Mina here is kind of an out of touch nerd with some real weird somewhat awkward swoopy movement tech that takes a while to really get down, and you're asked to get a handle on it pretty damn forcefully right up front. And also like Plague Knight, once you get the flow of that movement the game really opens up, and you pretty quickly start to fill out a MASSIVE subscreen full of accessories and such that leave you super well-off and really open the rest of the game up. I'll come back to the movement and how to deal with it, but I have some other points to get to first.
Doing my whole stream every single game I ever got in some bundle or giveaway thing, I've developed a really short fuse when it comes to Souls-like mechanics. There's three big ones, and they're all relevant to discussing Mina here. First we've got the whole semi-consumable healing items. These I don't mind seeing. Mina has something that's a bit like Dark Souls Estus Flasks and Bloodborne's thing I've only heard vague descriptions of where you basically smack your HP back out of enemies, but... let me just talk about the actual implementation here.
We've got checkpoints. Touch one, it's where you start from when you die. Hop into it and you've got a little rest stop. The downside to these (unless you're grinding) is that entering one respawns everything out in the world, which otherwise are surprisingly good about staying dead even if you leave the area. The upside is you get a full heal, you can swap out your primary weapon (once you have more than the one you pick at the start), change which cool accessories you have equipped, pull banked cash of the ATM essentially, and recover back up to your max (3 initially) of healing vials you can use whenever. The catch with these is... they're empty.
Once you've taken damage, you've got the red part of your HP bar, representing the HP you have left, and the empty portion. If you hit enemies, or pick up certain items, this fills in with yellow. Pop a vial (which locks you in place for a moment) and all the yellow in your bar turns red. Oh and if you get hit more you lose both yellow and red HP bar juice. So there's a lot of risk/reward with it. If I'm at like 50% HP, even if I'm in the middle of fighting a boss or something, I can pretty reliably fill that, back off, heal to full... but then I'm down a vial until I hit a checkpoint or find a replacement under a rock or in a bush or whatever (they're like, Zelda fairy rare). OR I can play riskier, let myself get real low, see if I can farm up a full bar of yellow at 5% HP or whatever and get a full heal out of that same vial... OR I can realize that's not happening and just drink what I've got, bring myself back up to 50% or 75% or whatever.
It's a bit of a complex mechanic, but again it is VERY flexible, and it's honestly pretty freaking generous compared to... really anything at all that doesn't let you just buy a stack of 99 potions and use them from the pause menu or whatever. You can just fully top off your HP 3 times between all your visits to check points, maybe even more, especially if you're in a dungeon or something! Yeah you need to whack a skeleton or something to get the vial juice before you drink it, but unless you're getting wrecked by pits and spikes somewhere you can get a good bit pretty consistently (to be fair, that DOES happen, but to also be fair, it's pretty generous spreading the pick-up vial juice near those).
It IS harsh and stingy if you compare it directly to Dark Souls, specifically, where you have your per-check-point visit pile of healing at all times, all filled up for you, and well, yeah. I hate to break it to you if this is new information, but in stark contrast to the way they market themselves, the Souls games are actually super easy games for babies. They give you super generous resources to heal up with and big ol' shields and parries and dodge rolls and all the monsters have these big exaggerated like 3 second wind-ups on their attacks, and pretty much everything in them has absolutely no answer at all to it if you ever think to use ranged attacks, and if all else fails they have these systems where you can full on just invite someone from the internet to hop into your game and kill a boss you're stuck on for you. Other games don't let you heal up unless you find a healing item mid-level and you have to use it right there, or they don't let you heal at all until you beat a boss at the end of a level, or you might even just die from a single hit. All these modern systems are being super generous, really.
Anyway, the next thing I see people getting upset about in Mina here besides the healing vials starting empty is: a bunch of people a traumatized by the sort of corpse runs they make you do in the Souls games, things cribbing from the Souls games (or for the older crowd, Diablo 2) are out there screaming about how awful it is that "when you die in Mina you lose all your bones and have to make a corpse run to get them back!" Bones being a resource that acts both as money and experience points here. And I want to be very very clear about this, it's possibly the most important point I'm going to make here:
People talking about losing their bones when they die in Mina the Hollower and having to do corpse runs to get them back are lying.
It's weird! Like, I kinda get it? There is certainly A Resource you drop whenever you die, and you can get it back if you return to where you died, maybe kill the thing that took it, but you do not lose bones when you die! You DO lose all the bones you have on hand when you get a game over and have to continue. That is a very very different concept!
See, Mina kinda brings back this concept we used to have in games (and honestly still do if you play a wider selection of games) called lives. Well, OK, here they're called Sparks, and they're actually significantly more generous than lives. You start off with one spark, out of a maximum of one, which is admittedly pretty harsh, but you can eventually (pretty darn early in the game, even) raise that maximum quite a bit, and there's lots of ways to fill back up to that maximum. Every time you up your spark max, you get full sparks. Every time you level up, you get full sparks. When you game over, you of course get full sparks. And as mentioned, if you can get back to where you died (maybe with the caveat of having to avenge yourself first) you can take back the spark you lost when you died there. The avenging yourself bit is where it gets particularly generous too. Die to an environmental hazard or whatever, just get back to where you were, there's a one up right by where you died, essentially. Get killed by a boss or that one freakin' bird, OK, it's going to hold that spark hostage until you kill it... BUT, generally, only that specific one! Die to the same boss again, it's inventory is too full to take another life from you, you can get that one back before starting the fight again, you're good to go forever as long as you can consistently get back to the boss without dying, and if you can't do that... you know, maybe go somewhere else? Or grind in some fashion?
Again, when you first start, it does seem kinda really harsh. I need to grind up some bones to start upgrading. I have to go somewhere scary to do that (not actually true, you can get a LOT in the basic hub town), when I go to that scary place I keep getting killed by this big freaky knight or some jerk crow or whatever, it takes my only spare life hostage, so I have to go back for that, and NOW I lost all the bones I was grinding up. But as soon as you have a second one, you're pretty much never going to see the game over screen again.
And... OK sorry if I'm over-explaining this, but it seems to be a REAL stumbling block with people who already have the game, and misinformation about it is scaring a bunch of people away, but even if you are in a situation where you just keep losing your only spark somewhere, it's not actually a big deal? If you died to something you're not prepared to handle, just let it go. It's an extra life. It doesn't have any value beyond being a life you just lost (technically this isn't actually true- there's barriers you have to pop sparks into to pass, they're refunded when you leave, mostly it's a way to gate certain shops off until you're a bit further into the game). You can leave it. Especially if you have to grind before you're ready to head back in there... the act of grinding will give you the spark back anyway. If you were really close to a big purchase or level up, you still are. That resource is still untouched. You can get back out to town even if you're deep in a dangerous area because this game loves shortcuts like Etrian Odyssey loves shortcuts (and yeah, Souls games do too, but they're stingier about it, and it's one of the many good things in those games that people aren't constantly cribbing from for some reason).
And it's not like you ever actually need to be carrying around a copious amount of bones on you! Remember how I mentioned the checkpoint ATMs? Yeah so there's both bones (which you lose on game over) and bonestone (which you don't). Sometimes you find the latter, it goes into a bank, you can pull it out as needed, or direct spend it in shops. We've also got this oddly Zelda 2 style experience system. You've got 4 stats, sorta. Attack, Defense, Side Weapon Attack, and Big Bonestone Deposit. The second you hit enough bones to level one up, you get he delightful message Bone Up! and you can either level something up that you can afford, or wait until the next-lowest comes around. AND one of those options is just to convert everything to bonestone right then. So if you're worried about bone loss from a game over, just... spend what you have on hand (maybe dip into the bank to top off) or bank your next level up (which is already giving you a full heal and all your lives back), and tada, now you have nothing to lose and who cares if you game over? There's infinite continues and you don't lose anything else here. You just need to evict the anxiety monster in your head lying and saying it's a corpse run mechanic.
And finally, we have the one thing that's admittedly pretty hard to learn in this game, and even more so if you're Souls-like brained. That movement tech I mentioned right at the top. Mina has a pretty simple control scheme really. You've got four face buttons. One attacks, one uses sub-weapons, one pops a healing vial, and the other is a bit contextual based on how long you hold it. If you tap it, you jump. It's like identical jump physics to the feather in Link's Awakening by the way. If you hold it, you still jump, and when you land from that jump, you dive underground and can burrow around until either you let go, or... I wanna say it's 2 or 3 seconds pass (plus however long it takes you to get out from under a desk or whatever). While you're burrowing, most things can't hurt you, and you move extra fast. When you unburrow, you jump again, and if you're underground for at least a second or so, you build up a charge and you can go twice as far on that jump. It's hard to get used to, with the speedy underground part being flanked by the two jumps and all, but you get used to it. The important thing to remember with it though is that burrowing is NOT a dodge roll!
I hate corpse runs. They're just frustrating and stressful and discourage just taking a break and stepping away for a while if you're hitting a wall in a game, and I genuinely can't think of an exception where they add something to a game. If you're designing a game, I am comfortable saying to you, hey, don't put corpse runs in it. However, there is something that has infected the minds of damn near every game designer it feels like since Dark Souls was a really big hit that I hate coming across even more than I hate corpse runs. Reaction based combat.
The Souls games themselves, I need to stress, get a pass from me on this. They are inherently very slow plodding thoughtful experiences where everything kinda moves like it's underwater and you've got your head on a swivel looking for stuff that can kill you while you're focused on the thing trying to kill you, it all works very smoothly there. But generally, the way you fight anything in a souls game is, you just kinda get up in its face, you wait until it tries to attack you, you use some sort of active defense move, generally a dodge roll or a parry, you thus avoid all damage, and the enemy is now in this defenseless state where you can get in a solid hit or three before it recovers. It's kind of turn-based combat in action games really. And again, I hate it. It's a momentum killer, I get bored waiting for it to be my turn, it kinda removes all other interesting tactical stuff I might otherwise do. It's awful and puts me off most games.
But, you know, I'm kind of an outlier here. Most people, seems like, have been all to happy to have just a steady diet of like nothing but reaction based combat in everything since... holy crap, 2011!? Yeah there are kids playing games who have never known anything else. And yes I know it's 2009 if I go back to Demon's Souls, but that wasn't enough of a hit for EVERYONE to start copying them. Anyway, point is, it encourages really bad habits that make it really rough when you switch over to a game with active combat. This is also why Souls-heads had such a hard time with Silksong and rushed to switch to the Hollow Knight combat style in it.
But yeah. Mina has healing like a Souls game, and shortcuts, and things to retrieve where you died, but if you go into it expecting combat like a Souls game, it's going to be a problem. If you stand around in a boss' attack range, wait for it to attack, and hold that jump/burrow button, what is going to happen is that attack is going to hit you and do a lot of damage. The jump before the burrow is the opposite of having I-frames. You need to train yourself all the way out of that one (or I guess get the shield, I think the manual mentioned it has an active parry, I have no intention of using the thing and I'm maining the whip like a good girl).
When I say this is a game with active combat, I mean you really never want to let enemies take the lead. A generally good tactic that's just really intuitive from the start is of course to burrow between an enemy's legs, pop up behind it, smack it once or twice, and burrow again while it comes back for you. This is particularly true for these knights that show up pretty early on, what with having shields to block attacks from the front. But you don't just square up with them. Those knights in particular have sight lines, like the guards in A Link to the Past. When you first approach them (and this is true for most enemies really) they won't notice you. You can sneak around behind them, get the first hit in. Once they're aware of you, either because you just hit them or were otherwise noticed, they're going to try to run up and attack you. The time to do the burrow thing is when they're approaching, not when they're starting to attack. So, you actively start combat by hitting them, they react by trying to close and counter. Before they can do that, you get the hell out of there (jump away right after you attack, burrow to a good position). With the knights I mentioned, they WILL lose track of you if you go straight under them from front to back, so you can then rinse and repeat. With other things, just getting the hell away to the far side of the screen is often the better play, or an intercept path for the damn birds.
The end result is probably going to look very similar to that reactive combat I hate if someone's looking over your shoulder. Very strike dodge strike dodge, but you need to be the aggressor, and be on the move again before they can even try to hit back. And you know, once you have that down, it's still a pretty challenging game. It doesn't pull its punches on the tricky platforming like jumping between moving platform with spikes shooting out all over and maybe you're dodging a freaking Phanto from Super Mario Bros. 2 But yeah, learn the flow, don't try to dodge-and-counter, don't think you have to go recover sparks, and remember it's a game where you can totally grind and it pays off fast (especially if you talk to that skull headed gardener early on a couple times and get the bones-are-just-constantly-dropping trinket) and the initially super steep difficulty curve flattens out in a real satisfying way. Or you can always swallow your pride and mess with the literally 100 or so finicky little difficulty settings this game has because it's just a tad overcooked by that 6 year dev cycle.
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