Mina, as indicated by the title of her game, is a member of the Hollower's Guild, a group who researches different ways to burrow underground.  A good Hollower can actually travel faster underground than above it, and Mina is one of the very best despite her young age and lack of experience.  With a quick dive into the earth she can zip beneath the surface to avoid its dangers, which are far more numerous than you'd expect such a cute mouse-fighter to have to deal with.

Mina the Hollower is Yacht Club Games' first non-Shovel Knight adventure, funded with a highly-successful Kickstarter last year and with a demo in strong enough shape to bring to PAX East.  Much like Shovel Knight, Mina the Hollower targets the look of an older system, but this time it's styled after the Game Boy Color rather than NES.  Screenshots alone make it look like a macabre Zelda, but a little hands-on time showed that there's more than a touch of the Soulsborne games in there as well.  The demo didn't begin with the opening, instead tossing the player into the deep end when Mina has a couple of powers and the enemies expect her to know how to use them, and wasn't shy at all about hurting those who couldn't get up to speed.

The first choice to make was selecting a primary weapon, and it comes in three types.  Initially Mina was supposed to have a whip with a spiked ball on the end, but Kickstarter goals added two more to the mix in the form of a slow but powerful hammer that delivers a charged strike, plus fast knives that are short on the attack range but can be thrown so long as you don't mind picking them back up again afterwards.  Burrows found throughout the level act not just as save points, but also let you swap between one weapon and another, not to mention provide a much-needed full healing.  While time limitations made it hard to experiment with the different weapons on the show floor, where I mostly stuck with the default Nightstar whip, experimenting with the weapons and learning which ones work best in the right situation should be a lot of fun at home.

Once armed it was time to explore the demo's dungeon, which was a crypt overrun with setting-appropriate monsters.  The start was simple, letting the player get by treating it like Zelda by using little more than the standard attack, but the farther in it goes the more Mina's hollowing ability comes into play.  While Mina isn't particularly slow, she's a lot faster underground, and it doesn't take long for enemies that can land a few hits before going down to show up.  Hollowing also lets Mina burrow under items like barrels, which make excellent projectiles, plus find secret rooms indicated by a subtle pattern at the base of a wall.

Secrets are scattered liberally throughout the game, sometimes holding new side-characters with their own frequently-gothic story to uncover.  While Mina is adorable her world is not, although it has been seasoned with a dash of Cute to make the morbidity go down easier.  Granted, the end result of a chain of secrets may be a mini-boss encounter, but there are also stray souls who could use a hand, not to mention the usual reward in the game's currency of bones.  Some secrets are more obscure than others, and one of Mina the Hollower's goals is to provide plenty of incentive for replay with extra content for those who like to track it down, or ignore it entirely for a good speed-run.

The most important thing about Mina the Hollower, though, is that while the PAX East demo was a nice chunk of game, it was the kind of demo that leaves you wanting more.  The crypt was a great dungeon, well designed with a wide variety of encounters, and the hollowing skill felt like it has the potential to add a lot to both combat and exploration.  Mina's weapon variety may not seem huge with the three main ones, but they each play differently enough that it will take skill to specialize in them, and the secondary weapons give a couple extra options to the combat.  Enemies have a nice variety of attack patterns and take require the full use of Mina's skills to take down without losing health, and the boss fight that ended the demo took a couple of tries to get through but had a reasonable set of attack patterns to figure out.  It's a gloomy and unforgiving world in the gothic depths of Mina the Hollower, but a determined mouse fighter has all the tools she needs to fight back the darkness.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/3607085/type/dlg/sid/UUhgUeUpU7786/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fx0aJCRRpE