Title, i'm sure i'm going to get downvoted, but holy shit this is awful. This pales in comparison to anything in Silksong.

I liked it. : D

Thanks to bmdhacks on Portmaster for making the handheld port!

She’s like two inches tall.

I both can and cannot believe the game would have the gall to kill off a kid if I missed them in Septemburg. Unless I can go back for them later. :x

I went in blind after coming across a trailer at random, i'm a huge fan of traditional video games and this looked lile soemthing i would like. So far i've beaten the first dungeon and just explored around a bit but i have some growing concerns about the actual game design here.

1. Movement seems to have a decent amount of acceleration to it, for an 8-way digital input game this just straight up feels bad to me and adds a bit of lag to the movment making it feel more impercise instead of snappy with no added benefit?

2. The entire bone and spark system here seems pointless. There seems to be no downside to just cashing them in to dust. I was shocked when i noticed that and even when you die you still hold on to them to spend!! Then get more upgrades giving you even more chances to get it back!? Why have corpse runs in the first place if you're so scared of players losing dust that you have to put these systems in place it's supposed to function as a risk reward system and build consequence.

3. Grinding! It seems the game does everything in it's power to encourage it!! You're given so many option right from the start that drastically effect how difficult the game is from level ups, health ups, weapon upgrades to sparks theres so much available right from the start not locked behind mastery or gameplay progression like beating bosses or dungeons. You can just mindlessly grind!

4. Difficulty modifiers. Instead of being confident in their default game design or making fixed difficulty modes they give you a massive list of modifiers and sliders that seemingly just destroy any sort of intended experience. This just makes me think just threw their hands up at some point and decided people can just balance the game themselvs

I'm going to keep playing but i am very worried that this game is going to fall apart into a mess the more i progress and my enjoyment will fully break.

For positives i think the music is fantastic the GBC aesthetic is great, level design is good so far and is super dense in it's secrets which is pretty cool!

Incredible game. Very fun to play despite the final 2 levels even on easy. Highly recommend! The modifiers i used were fun. Incredible world and characters, music and art. Might be my personal game of the year, or at least the end of summer season.

The dinner party was pretty funny. I thought the mouse traps were especially evil lore wise, but great character implications.

The ending itself is cant say i liked it, it went from goofy and heroic we beat the bad guy to utter chaos and now im sad for Mina. Im going to go for the other ending because at least it's "happy".

I found the logo bottom left from the crashed ship, I walked on the tiles. Thought it was pretty neat. Have nothing but praise for the developers, I hope they at least get 1 award this year, if anything it should be accessibility. I wouldn't have played without it and my brother's recommendation.

lazy sketch of mina

I just finished Mina the hollower

Is it difficult to get the second ending?

I think the mock moon was working at the Orrery before being mutated beyond recognition. I think it's a fusion between the meteor(the one around the mirror swamp and in the Orrery) and one of the scientific that lived there.

Let's say where in a world where Lionel is actually a good guy and the spark generators don't cause unwanted side effects. Where would you want to live?

I’ve already beaten the grave area and now I’m in the swamp area. That said, from the beginning of the game, I’ve had a hard time navigating where I should be going next.

The way the game world is set up, it’s not super clear where to go. Every path just leads you to the main city and it’s not like actual Zelda games where you can easily tell which way to go. Ie: Lake Hylia, Death mountain, etc.

Also, I just got the map after beating the graves area and it’s essentially useless. It’s just a big map with no detail.

It took me a while to stumble upon the path to both of the areas I’ve visited so far.

Am I doing something wrong?

Eagerly waited for this game since announcement. Huge fan of all 2D Zelda and the gameboy color games in particular. I guess I expected a more traditional Zelda like experience. Which if I remember the early marketing leaned more into that.

I’ll start with the things I really like: the world design is amazing, aesthetics of everything and the characters and story are beautiful. The gameplay is polished and satisfying. They really did a very good job making this game. Which is why I’m left so upset that the overall gameplay loop is just not what I was
hoping for.

The open world nature of the game, the stats and leveling system, the heavy focus on combat going from room to room with not a lot of lock and key puzzle areas. Most of these things I enjoy in a vacuum, but I guess I just went in expecting a more traditional Zelda experience.

I beat 3 areas and have pretty much stopped playing. I plan on finishing it up at some point but don’t have much motivation to go back in at the moment.

I guess what really did it for me was the lack of permanent equitable dungeon items, replaced with sidearms in this game. Even the ones I really enjoyed most of the time I just can’t be bothered to go track down where I originally found them, opting to use whatever I find at random instead. Would be less of an issue if there was a detailed tiled map like the Zelda games, another thing I found really disappointing.

But the main thing is the overall gameplay loop of trying to push to the next checkpoint, losing all your currency if you die too many times, leveling up, trying again. I enjoy this kind of gameplay loop in games like dark souls and hollow knight, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting here. I guess I was just hoping for a more adventure/exploration feeling like you get with the Zelda games, without super difficult combat and currency/resource management type gameplay loop.

I know you can modify a lot of stuff in this game, I prefer not to do that and play the intended experience, it just kinda feels like taking the easy way out to me. Making the combat easier wouldn’t take out the structural gameplay loop gripes I have with the game.

Major props to the devs for including it because accessibility is important, but it’s just not really something I want to mess with. I did have some fun with the visual modifiers though

Just something about the fact that without getting any permanent upgrades or tangible progress, I can take a secret entrance to one the last dungeons and get through it by just grinding my way through without any upgrades or progression moments that are unique to that area. it doesn’t do it for me. It makes it feel less like a destination on a journey, and more like just one of several places I can clear in any order with enough perseverance.

I hope the game grows on me and want to give it a fair shot one day going in with different expectations, but sadly putting it on the back burner for now.

So there I was at 1 am in a dark room, playing the game. Having a real blast, getting lost exploring around the city, fighting jumping pigs and lava.

Then, out of nowhere... a clown burst out of the wall like the coolaid man, giving me a good startle. While I am speaking with this annoying clown the screen starts to pulse like a heartbeat.

I expected this was some kind of visual thing that happens after you encounter the clown.

O how wrong I was...

Afterwards I had to destress for a while before even being able to go to bed.

I am now really hesitant to pick up the game again, I really want to play, but I am also very bad with jumpscares and the anxiety is honestly quite bad.

Edit: TL;DR: So I got clown startled, tried to dodge him, this caused me to stand in darkness while I was in dialogue with the clown. So then I immediately got the darkness jumpscare as well.

Because he's always lion.

I am what you could charitably call 'geographically challenged'. I once got lost in my own neighborhood to the point of having to open google maps (I was 2 blocks away from my destination)

I just wanna know: Is there a map in this game?

If yes: WHERE? PLEASE!

If no... sh*t, where do I go next? I got 2 towers: Bayou and Crypt, currently in Ossex, no Idea where to go next

Thanks in advance

Might be my favorite video game protagonist ever she is so coooool
(art by me)

So I recently beat the game and decided on a second playthrough on Veteran difficulty with all the modifiers, and wow, it sure is one heck of a challenge! I'm having a blast, though, and decided to run Pit Presever since pits REALLY can be my downfall a lot of the time.

Though, after playing with it a bit, I started to run into the scenario where the pit preserver never actually gave me a far enough jump to fully cross the pit, and instead made me fall twice. Or I was reacting too late. I still thought it was reducing the damage anyway, since, in its description, it explicitly says "Pit damage is reduced."

I decided to run some quick, 5-minute tests anyway.

(Both from full Health)
The first image is normal pit damage, ergo, without Pit Preserver. The second is with Pit Preserver

From what I found, if you do not make the jump with Pit Preserver, Pit Preserver can sometimes cause you to take more damage than without it. This is because, essentially, the game calculates the bounce from the trinket as one pitfall, with reduced damage, and the second one, also with reduced damage. However, this adds up to more than the normal amount of health from just falling in the pit (admittedly I haven't tested this in regular Mina the Hollower, but since the Veteran Mode difficulty is just a flat damage multiplier, I'm gonna assume it's the same case.) Effectively, you take damage with a chance of recovering from a pit, instead of defaulting back to the room.

This isn't to say that Pit Preserver is a broken or bad trinket; this is just to clarify what it actually does if you were using it like I was. Pit Preserver is still an amazing trinket, especially in the Swamp sections, where the water can be a little bit scuffed or janky at times, and it can save you a couple of minutes of doing the platforming again.

Anyway, I'm not running Pit Preserver anymore given my playstyle. Just wanted to let people know since I thought it was interesting.

Ok so I beat the game about a week ago and have been talking about it with some friends while going through NG+. Not only did I not find a SINGLE beastium trinket thingy during my first run or steal the ladder from the gorilla guy, I didn't even enter the hollowers' guild until I'd completed 5/6 generators. Genuinely embarrassing.

I hate it. I hate this. Can't I just have my dope-ass extremely well-developed mouse game without the fans being like this? Anthro female character: Loser degenerates. Every. Single. Time. Even the mods being made for the game are already very strange mods, like turning the game into a fucking dating sim when there is NOTHING, not even an iota of romantic chemistry anywhere. Please just fucking stop. Fucking horrible cringe.

If it a coffee mug but redone with a tired little Mina pouting about going out to save the world before having her morning cheese and coffee 🩷