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  "description": "Astonishingly beautiful and immensely rewarding, Mina the Hollower is a brilliant adventure game that delights and surprises at every turn.",
  "path": "/mina-the-hollower-playstation-review/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-27T13:00:30.000Z",
  "site": "https://regionfree.net",
  "tags": [
    "Review Guide"
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  "textContent": "### The Verdict\n\n**What works**\n\n  * • Astonishingly gorgeous visual style.\n  * • Pitch-perfect gameplay and difficulty.\n  * • Smartly utilized accessibility options.\n\n\n\n**What doesn't work**\n\n  * • Occasionally, so devoted to the style it's hard to parse.\n\n\n\nRegion Free Rating\n\n★★★★★\n\n5/5\n\n🕹️\n\n****Platform:**** PlayStation 5 Pro\n****Version:**** Digital retail review code provided by the distributor\n\n****Independence & Ethics****\nRegion Free is entirely reader-supported and maintains full editorial independence. For more on my scoring and standards, see the Review Guide.\n\nNostalgia is a difficult business. Too much of it is poison; too little feels like vying for cheap points. At any point, your audience might decide it's not the right time to relive this particular moment in their lives, instead opting for the sweet embrace of a different era altogether. So to build your entire game around 8-bit aesthetics and gameplay, while mixing in the already divisive difficulty of the soulslike genre, is the kind of foolhardy ambition that I can't help but admire.\n\nMina the Hollower is a hugely specific title for an increasingly niche audience. It is also one of the best games of the year. It's catnip for those of us who grew up with the Game Boy and the original Nintendo Entertainment System.\n\nYet it isn't just a gorgeous rendition of the past; this is an intelligent and immensely rewarding adventure game with surprisingly deep mechanics buried within a deceptively simple frame. Combined with a vast overworld that you can explore freely – even heading for the final boss right at the start – Mina the Hollower is one of those intricate games you can play and replay for years, and it will still feel fresh.\n\nMina the Hollower has a purity of vision that I find admirable. It doesn't bother with massive amounts of exposition, and it only takes minutes for the actual gameplay to kick in. Like the games it emulates, Oracle of Seasons and Alundra come to mind, Mina begins with a shipwreck on a remote island where nothing is as it initially seems.\n\nSoon, Mina is tasked with restoring the Sparks, a technology she helped invent, and restoring peace to a besieged city. Yet, in Lovecraftian fashion, Mina can't shake the feeling that it might be too late for some of the citizens. Especially those comfortable with their near-unlimited power.\n\nThe gameplay itself is a familiar mix of platforming and action, where Mina employs a growing arsenal of weapons and gadgets that help her dispatch evil forces. At first, the limited directionality felt surprisingly restrictive. Mina can only move in directly vertical or horizontal directions, so any attempts at zig-zagging are best forgotten instantly. Platforming, likewise, is punishing in the way old Ducktales games used to be. If an enemy hits you, Mina will recoil backwards and take damage, sometimes falling into a pit if they're in a precarious position.\n\nFor the first couple of hours, I felt frustrated and annoyed by this, I won't lie. I've grown so accustomed to a lower difficulty that Mina's unforgiving nature really rubbed me the wrong way. I adjusted combat modifiers from the settings and spent the next couple of hours just finding my groove. When I did, I returned everything to the base level and found the experience joyful.\n\nIt's here that Mina's brilliant use of accessibility shines. It allows everyone to experience the game on their terms, and then gives a clear path back to \"normality\" and beyond.\n\nEven if you don't want to engage with the modifiers and settings, Mina introduces light RPG elements to the mix, where grinding for bones allows you to raise your stats to help overcome challenges. No matter how you approach the game, it feels like Yacht Club Games has meticulously tinkered with and tuned every element for maximum enjoyment.\n\nAfter a tutorial of sorts, Mina the Hollower unfolds exactly as the player wants to. The sprawling overworld map connects each of the levels into one major hub, and you can complete the main quest in any order you desire – including going directly to the final dungeon, if you're a masochist. There are optional bosses peppered all over the place, and, initially, Mina feels almost overwhelmingly difficult.\n\nFor the first couple of hours, I kept getting my little mousey butt handed to me by everything on the map. At one point, I escaped through multiple screens with only a few hits left on my health bar, when I accidentally stumbled into a massive boss battle. I wasn't expecting it, but somehow Mina the Hollower managed to capture the same sense of exploration and helplessness as Elden Ring.\n\nOn the flipside, the moment Mina clicks, and you start to engage with the controls and game mechanics, the transition from prey to hunter is swift. As with games like Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3, Mina rewards those willing to learn. Unlike those games, it also offers a robust array of modifiers, cheats, and helpers that make the adventure feel truly your own. It features some of the most helpful accessibility settings in terms of difficulty I've seen in a game so far.\n\nMina the Hollower is both a big and small game all at once. According to the challenges in the game, you can complete it in under four hours. For me, it's taken closer to 20 just to clear the main quest. But I'm all thumbs, and I've certainly spent longer than necessary grinding abilities and \"boning up\" (as the game calls levels).\n\nBut that's part of the fun. The more you play Mina, the better you get, and I can't wait to see what kind of speedruns start cropping up in the coming years, as players get more comfortable with the mechanics, hidden passages, and abilities.\n\nFor those who love exploration and taking their time, Mina is an equally rewarding experience. It combines open-world adventuring with finely-tuned Metroidvanias, complete with unlockable shortcuts, hidden areas, and a constant sense of discovery as you remember a remote location you saw hours earlier, but now have the confidence to explore more thoroughly.\n\nThere is no map, or none that I've found, so a lot of the adventure relies on your own ability to remember. During my playthrough, I scribbled out notes and drawings, just like I used to do as a kid, playing through A Link to the Past for the first time. I love it when any game gets me to engage with it on a deeper level like this, and Mina feels all the more rewarding when you realize that you don't need a map anymore.\n\nFor a game that emulates the intentionally low-quality aesthetic of the 8-bit era, Mina the Hollower is a gorgeous experience. Every level, character, and enemy is intricately designed to work for modern standards, and it's genuinely baffling at how many variants of everything there are to discover.\n\nNaturally, it's a bit of a fib to begin with. Mina is so densely packed with information that it could never fit on an 8-bit cartridge. It is a modern game in retro clothing, but the illusion is nearly perfect nonetheless. Especially when it comes to the majestic soundtrack, composed by Shovel Knight maestro Jake Kaufman and industry legend Yuzo Koshiro. Every track here is a banger, and it's one of those games where you want to linger in certain areas just to enjoy the music a little bit longer.\n\nWhen Shovel Knight launched over 12 years ago, I was deeply enamored by it. To date, it remains one of my favorite games of all time. Something that I've played on nearly every console and handheld device since then. I was skeptical that Mina the Hollower couldn't follow such a titanic classic.\n\nFor the first few hours, I felt like my initial concerns were right. Mina isn't as instantly accessible as the straightforward platforming adventure of Shovel Knight. It is a harder, more robust, and far deeper experience, and that requires more patience from anyone willing to engage with it.\n\nBut give Mina time, and try out its multitude of settings, and you'll discover a hugely ambitious game that astounds with its deep understanding and love for this genre. It is far beyond a high-fidelity reproduction of the past; it is an evolution of a classic genre that amplifies conventions for the next generation.\n\nSuperbly designed, beautifully put together, and intensely rewarding at every turn, Mina the Hollower is one of the best games of the year.",
  "title": "Mina the Hollower is old-school adventure gaming done right",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-27T13:00:40.518Z"
}