It’s no secret that parries are en vogue right now—they’ve broken their just containment in character action games and spectacle fighters and wormed their way into roguelikes, horror games, JRPGs, and FPSes, all while properly taking over the Soulslike in the wake of Sekiro.
If you long for the simpler times back when enemies just smoked you and got it over with, you might take a shine to Classicvania and Zelda-inspired adventure game Mina the Hollower, the next game from Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games. Speaking with Knowledge, Yacht Club co-founder Sean Velasco highlighted the game’s simple control setup intended to “take something old and rejig it,” as reported by GamesRadar.
“There are limitations, but the limitations are what provide the fun,” Velasco told Knowledge. “Every game has a parry now. I played that new Doom, and even Doom has Dark Souls stuff in it … We didn’t want to do something with a simple dodge-roll. We try to take something old and rejig it, do something interesting with it.”
To that end, Mina’s maneuverability is limited; she can jump and burrow, and the rest is “about getting that neutral space and playing it like a Castlevania or a Bloodborne—games that don’t have a block,” as Velasco told Knowledge.
I haven’t had a chance to try Mina the Hollower yet, but former PC Gamer associate editor Tyler Colp said it “awakened the GBA kid” in him when he tried it earlier this year, also noting that it reeked of Bloodborne influence with its health vial chugging and deliberate movement. It seems like Yacht Club aims to thread the needle between influences in a similar way that endeared me to Shovel Knight, which stood tall as a retro tribute while also bringing new ideas to the table.
In that Knowledge interview, Velasco described all this back-and-forth trading of gameplay ideas as a “great conversation,” noting that “all the game mechanics [are converging].” Love or hate the ubiquity of parry mechanics, it’s that same indirect dialog between developers that leads to a game like this one, inspired by NES classics and modern Soulslikes in equal measure.
If you’re interested in giving Mina the Hollower a go, its release date is TBD; but you can wishlist the game on Steam.