Digging For Gems

“I’m, like, so incredibly heads down on everything that I’m really just focused completely on the game. Except for you! Now is the time we can chat about everything.”

These are the exasperated yet enthusiastic words of Sean Velasco, founder of Yacht Club Games, as we begin a video call where he will walk me through new gameplay of the studio’s next title, Mina the Hollower, likely for the final time before its October 31 release. Though Velasco appears mildly frazzled in the way I’ve grown accustomed to seeing game designers during the busy final weeks of development, his excitement radiates through the screen as he fires up the game and hurriedly sifts through various debug menus to showcase the retro-inspired adventure.

Mina the Hollower is the first wholly original game for Yacht Club in more than a decade, a studio famed for its 2014 classic, Shovel Knight. Conceived initially as a side passion project by studio designer Alec Faulkner – a story we chronicled in a 2022 behind-the-scenes documentary – the classic Zelda-inspired game was successfully crowdfunded via Kickstarter and has spent over five years in development. With mere weeks until release, Velasco reveals new details about the game while sharing both hopes and fears of its potential reception.

Bigger is Better

The adventure stars the titular mouse Mina, an inventor, scientist, and member of the Hollowers, a guild dedicated to studying the Earth’s resources. Many years before the game’s events, Mina invented Spark Generators to power Tenebrous Isle, bringing electricity to its residents and ushering in an age of prosperity. Years later, Mina receives a letter from her former patron stating someone has sabotaged this technology; she returns to get to the bottom of things. If you played the game’s recent Steam or Switch demos, you’d have played an opening section laying this out. Velasco is here to show me what lies beyond that small slice.

We begin by quickly running down the gameplay basics. Players use one of several starter weapons, such as Mina’s signature whip, as well as a hammer and twin swords. These weapons can sport two upgrades, like holding the attack button after using the whip to deal an extra pulse of damage (and wiggle it around à la Super Castlevania IV).

Speaking of Castlevania, Mina can also sport one sidearm, such as lobbing an axe or throwing a boomerang-like knife, which expends a mana bar. The coolest sidearm I saw was a lamp that summoned ghosts that “haunt” (i.e., attack) targets. Players drop equipped sidearms upon death; purchasing an upgrade later in the game prevents this, however. You’ll also gain the ability to wield more than one at some point.

Per the title, Mina’s signature ability, and the core mechanic the game is designed around, is Hollowing. She can burrow underground to unearth buried items, slip underneath obstacles or enemies, or simply get around faster. Environmental puzzles make cool use of this skill; in one fire zone, Velasco burrows to create trenches that reroute lava rivers to destroy destructible barriers. It’s a neat mechanic that makes the game feel like more than a plain Zelda homage.

Mina’s scope has expanded significantly since we filmed our 2022 documentary. Velasco describes the version we saw then as largely a collection of levels without a fun connective tissue. “We had all the core levels, and we sat down to play it, and it was like, ‘This sucks. It doesn’t hang together; it needs to be more cohesive. It needs a big world.’” Remedying this issue is why Mina’s development took so much longer. The 15-to-20 hour game now has large overworlds connecting its six main biomes.

Players must visit each zone to restore power to six broken Spark Generators in the central city of Ossex (more on this location later), and they can tackle these tasks in any order. However, some biomes have stronger enemies serving as not-so-subtle hints that you may be in over your head if you battle them too early. Sure, you could power through it, but you could be in for a rough time.

With such an expansive world, Velasco shows me an easy way to get around: special mirrors that warp players across the map. Entering these large mirrors transports players to Mirror’s End, a hidden world serving as a junction point to other mirrors Mina has unlocked. Mirror’s End has enemies and platforming challenges, so traversing this space isn’t a walk in the park. Furthermore, mirrors are not abundant, as Yacht Club wants players to spend more time engaging with the world instead of skipping large chunks of it.

Burrowing around and defeating threats rewards Bones, a currency used to level up Mina and improve her capabilities. Velasco heavily stresses the importance of gathering money, telling me, “You’re always scrounging, you need that money, you need to level up.” Gathering enough Bones lets you improve four attributes: main attack power, defense, sidearm attack power, and Bonestone (raising the amount of Bones that can be converted into this more permanent form). Each stat has a level 10 cap, though New Game Plus raises this cap another five levels or so.

Original red nose Mina illustration

A Tour of Ossex

Velasco takes me around the large central city of Ossex, featuring numerous shops and laden with secrets, like cracked walls that give way to hidden goodies or secret entrances to new areas. Ossex also sports unexpected verticality in the form of elevated pathways and rooms, some of which will be tricky to access.

I also get to meet some of the quirky citizens. At one point, Velasco avoids the gaze of a pickpocket; if spotted, this vagrant chases and knocks the Bones out of Mina to steal. We come across a few kids playing Kick the Can, and you can join in by swatting it with your weapon.

Velasco is particularly excited to show off a newspaper boy on a street corner advertising the latest issue. Reading the front page reveals a cool personal touch. “This newspaper is generated based on what you do,” explains Velasco. The newspaper also features in-universe editorials, a stat section tracking everything you’ve done (like the number of steps taken or deaths), and even provides gameplay hints.

Later, he runs into a fellow mouse named Maxi. She’s not our friend, though, proclaiming herself to be Mina’s superior and challenging her to a fight. Maxi also wields a whip, albeit a much longer one, capable of striking Mina from quite a distance. She hops around a lot, making her tough to keep in range of Mina’s attack. Through the magic of developer tools, Velasco’s Mina is very overleveled and makes quick work of Maxi, but I can tell this will be a much tougher confrontation for normal players. Maxi serves as a recurring rival who, while not critical to the plot, reappears a few times throughout the adventure. I’m curious to see how these encounters evolve.

Ossex changes as the adventure progresses. Characters met along the way may return to the city, for example. But the studio is careful to avoid making players feel like they have to constantly check back on the city to see any differences. “One thing we don’t want is for the player to feel like they have to go and do laps around [Ossex] every time to make sure nothing changed,” Velasco explains. “So we’ve been careful to try to not stick too many things in too many places to be annoying.”

A Useful Trinket

Regardless of where you choose to go, it’s a good idea to prepare for the adventure by outfitting yourself at Ossex’s Trinket Shop. Wood barracks block the entry, though, which means having to find an alternate way in. Expect several shops to have similar barriers, and finding a way in may be an obstacle-filled detour laden with enemies, pitfalls, and other hazards.

Trinkets are worth this effort. Equipping these items adds helpful perks and abilities tied to combat, traversal, and/or provides some kind of stat buff. One Trinket called Keri the Wisp gives Mina a Princess Peach-like float to extend her airtime by holding the jump button. In-game, it looks like a little fairy that holds Mina’s head to slow her descent for a second. The Parasol, an umbrella, serves a similar purpose, but it can also deflect incoming attacks and be thrown at enemies.

Other Trinkets include Brisk Brew, which lets you walk faster and gain a burst of speed each time you strike a foe. Getting hit while equipped with Repulsing Root drops a mandrake whose shriek pushes and damages enemies. Bellows Bustle lets Mina perform an airdash. One of Velasco’s favorite Trinkets is the Uranium Bracelet, which enables the player to deal and receive more damage.

He shows me many more Trinkets I won’t spoil, but the game features over 60 of these helpful items. Some Trinkets can be purchased at stores, and others can only be obtained by exploring. You can eventually equip up to six Trinkets, and their effects can interact with each other. Equipping Bellows Bustle with Keri the Wisp lets Mina perform an airdash with more hangtime and longer reach, for example.

The current Trinket pool was whittled from an initially massive spreadsheet of concepts. For a Trinket to be greenlit, its effect couldn’t be mutually exclusive; it had to be capable of being activated simultaneously with other Trinkets. Another important guideline was that Trinket effects couldn’t nullify the game’s core mechanics. “We wanted to make sure that everything was helping to enhance or otherwise work with the other elements of the game,” says Velasco. Lastly, every Trinket has to be fun, have relative parity with each other, and be useful to all types of players. Yacht Club doesn’t want to create Trinkets that no one would use.

Trinkets can be swapped by visiting Under Labs. As the name suggests, these are underground laboratories that act as safe rooms, and you access them by burrowing into specific dirt mounds around the map. Every owned Trinket sits in a chest, where you can, thankfully, sort them by categories such as Newest/Oldest, Most Used, or Offense/Defense. Under Labs also lets you swap your main weapon, refill healing vials, and transform Bones into Bonestone.

If you no longer need a Trinket, you can sell it at a pawn shop in Ossex called Pawnty’s Exchange. Trinkets sell for 30 percent of their value, which you can buy back later. This system goes back to Velasco’s point about the chase for money being one of the game’s primary loops: Is it better to keep a new Trinket or sell it for Bones to level up a crucial stat?

Bending the Rules

Mina draws inspiration from the games of yesteryear, which often had cheat codes. Yacht Club is incorporating this fan-favorite feature in the form of Modifiers. These special effects allow you to tinker with the game’s mechanics and systems in a myriad of ways, both for accessibility or just for kicks. You can activate floatier jumps, double the walking speed, make Mina invisible, turn on damage numbers, and have the ability to burrow indefinitely. You can even change the color palette with different visual filters, including the classic Game Boy green. Activating non-cosmetic Modifiers disables the in-game achievements, called Feats, however.

Although Velasco doesn’t have an exact number, he states the game has over 200 Modifiers to toy with. You must enter special codes to activate them, but codes aren’t found in-game. Instead, Yacht Club plans to issue the codes to players over time. It’s unclear how they’ll relay this messaging; code reveals will presumably happen on social media. But there’s also a good chance players will find them on their own.

“What happened with Shovel Knight is we also had a bunch of codes, and [players] just datamined them and they dumped them all on, like, the first day,” Velasco tells me. “So I imagine that’s probably what’s going to happen with this, too [laughs].”

An Existential Fear

The Steam demo helped Yacht Club identify problems to address. While Velasco feels good about how Mina’s been received thus far, he admits to mostly staying away from the larger online discussions about the demo to avoid the mental trap of getting too wrapped up in any negative feedback.

Shovel Knight’s massive success led to it receiving new playable characters, campaigns, and even spin-off titles. When I ask if Mina will receive a similar amount of support, Velasco bluntly responds, “No, definitely not.” This response will depend on how Mina is received, but he explains that outside of minor updates like balancing patches, Yacht Club doesn’t have substantial post-launch plans.

As Yacht Club focuses 100 percent of its energy on completing the game, the staff is feeling the full brunt of the stress, fear, and anxiety the final development stretch often brings. “If before there was an air of hope, now there’s an air of desperation,” Velasco says, laughing. “Like, ‘Oh god, we just want it to be done. Please let it be done.’”

It’s an understandable sentiment. Mina the Hollower is Yacht Club’s first new IP in a decade, but Velasco isn’t necessarily concerned about whether players will enjoy it. He’s confident the team has crafted a fun game. His primary worry is if it sells well, and the existential fear of what could happen if Mina doesn’t make enough money.

“But who knows if that fear is founded or not”, says Velasco. “With Shovel Knight, it was like ‘Oh god, if the game doesn’t come out, we’re going to go out of business.’ And now it’s like ‘Well, I guess if Mina didn’t sell, then we would be in pretty big trouble. We’d have to figure something out. So yeah, it is existential. You’re always only as good as the last thing you did.”

I end my conversation on a lighter note by asking the million-dollar question: Is there a Shovel Knight cameo in Mina the Hollower?

“No, there’s not,” Velasco insists with a smile. “We said no Shovel Knight, no Shovel Knight.”

To learn more about how Mina the Hollower came to be, check out our 2022 behind-the-scenes documentary