Although video games have come a long way from their 8-bit heritage, classic titles still enjoy a loyal fanbase today. That enduring appeal was something Yacht Club Games aimed to capture in their forthcoming release Mina the Hollower, which the studio says is a homage to the handheld games of old.
Although Mina was inspired by nostalgia for the Game Boy era, Yacht Club was aware of classic handheld games’ limitations. Game ZXC spoke with the studio’s marketing lead Celia Schilling about the title’s key gameplay mechanics, and how the developers struck a careful balance between a retro aesthetic and contemporary features.
Mina the Hollower Borrows from Classic RPGs and Platformers
Mina is set in a Gothic universe, inspired largely by 1986’s Castlevania, Schilling said. Some of the game’s features also take notes from both classic and contemporary titles like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and even Bloodborne.
“[T]he game also took inspirations from Gothic-era writings like The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula and Frankenstein,” Schilling said. The devs liked those worlds in particular, since they center around “a horrific descent from normality into something dark and spooky.” Yacht Club’s writers are leaning into those darker tones, Schilling said.
Gamers got a preview of that spooky vibe in Mina’s demo. The player meets a character called the Duke who enlists them to help find his lover, the Duchess. At the end of the quest, it’s revealed that the player has been leading the Duke to a coffin and that the Duchess has actually been dead the whole time. “At first it seems like a fun fetch quest,” Schilling said, “but it becomes sad.”
Meanwhile, players who take control of Mina’s namesake protagonist will have some tried-and-true RPG mechanics at their disposal. The devs are huge fans of RPG games, Schilling said, and that shows through in some gameplay features. Skills and health are upgradeable, and there’s a leveling system. Players can also match their particular play style by upgrading certain skills. Even as Mina nears completion, Yacht Club may still add more RPG features, Schilling said.
“We have a hard time putting down the creative pen.”
The devs built Mina’s around the concept of a “top-down Castlevania,” Schilling said. That, combined with combat-heavy mechanics and “open-ended, top-down exploration,” forms the basis of the title’s core gameplay. Exploration in particular will play a major focus in Mina, Schilling said. “It's blending everything that we loved about certain genres of games, and truly writing a love letter to the Game Boy.”
Mina the Hollower Blends Classic Visuals with Modern Technology
Yacht Club has often billed Mina as a “love letter” to classic handheld games. A lot of its art style is inspired by retro Game Boy titles. Even so, the studio wasn’t aiming for a perfect carbon copy, Schilling said.
“To paraphrase a colleague: because we wrote the game as a love letter to Game Boy, does that mean that we're being truly faithful to the genre? Well, we're making it for the modern era.”
The devs are staying faithful to classic handheld games’ color palette and the Game Boy’s requisite four colors per character sprite, Schilling said. They’re also using an eight by eight per pixel tile scheme, and matching the Game Boy’s four colors per sprite. Despite that, there were a lot of limitations to Game Boy games, she said, and in some cases the devs had to update some features for modern audiences.
One example where Mina’s features differ from its handheld predecessors was the game’s screen size. “Game Boy screens were very small, and TVs don’t use that aspect ratio anymore,” Schilling said. “It would be pretty difficult to stay faithful to that, so we did make it a little bit larger.“
Combining classic and current game mechanics “can feel like we're reinventing the wheel,” she said. The devs would take a feature from the Game Boy era and tweak it to make sense in Mina’s context. “It’s a lot of thinking about what you remember about games and love about them, and combining the two to make an experience that is reminiscent.”
Mina the Hollower is coming soon for PC.