Mina the Hollower first thoughts
This game starts incomplete- you are clunky and awkward in a way that the trailer for the game tries to avoid lingering on. The trailer shows you digging, jumping around, doing insane combos- in reality, the earliest enemies in the game will stomp your shit pretty easily. it's most noticeable with the mid-level baton mice that show up in the first area, which have a jumping attack that's extremely difficult to avoid when starting out.
I picked the word "Incomplete" very specifically, though- once a few upgrades are unlocked, the combat finds a much more natural flow. The enemy design has gotten better in general the further I've gotten from the starting areas, which is a funny reminder of how thoroughly most modern games fail Romero's #1 rule- hard to design the first level last when the first level needs to be delivered in a demo a year and a half ahead of the game's release to build wishlist interest!
Enemy AI is fairly complex, which isn't always a good thing in tech-heavy games like this. When enemies are predictable, it allows the player to innovate their own skills more easily. Complicated bosses I love - that's where you demonstrate everything you've learned - but complicated mooks just make getting around the world a pain in the ass.
On that note, exploration- This is one of those games that goes to great pains to avoid a metroidvania label. Technically, you don't get any double jump boots or power bracelet or anything like that, but in practical terms, the trinkets and sub-weapon slots fill the permanent upgrade role instead by offering conditional air dashes or high jumps. This is a huge problem for me, unfortunately! I don't love running into secrets in the world map that I can't actually reach and having to pencil them down to visit them later, so for my entire playthrough I'm going to be ignoring the thirty or so subweapons and 50 or so trinkets in the game, so I can cart around the two or three utility options that let me reach new locations.
Other than that, though, the secret hunting is a definite bright spot. The Tenebrous Isle is very densely connected, with a subterranean layer accompanying almost every room and bonus items and currency pickups littering every screen. There's also no gates on player progress, a constant frustration of mine in other ostensibly open-world games like this one. If you want to bash your head against the most difficult content right off the bat, that's your prerogative, or I should say, that's absolutely my prerogative.
There's also some impressive customizability on display. One annoyance of mine in upgrade-heavy games is the way that going for 100% completion tends to drastically overpower the player for the endgame combat. Mina features a pawn shop that allows you to sell equipment and upgrades temporarily for cash, and more importantly to manage your power level. I like secret hunting, but I don't always like trivializing content, and this provides a nice balance.
It's even possible to sell equipment you had when the game started, thereby making the game substantially harder to complete, which gets to my last point: I've gotten the feeling so far that Mina the Hollower is designed much more for the subsequent playthroughs than for the first. This goes beyond speedrun routing, with it allowing dozens of different styles of challenge run, from randomizers to hardcore mode to new game plus. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I wish it weren't quite so visible in the design before the first run is even complete.
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