Mina the Hollower is a critical success for Yacht Club, currently enjoying its status as the top-rated game of the year on Metacritic. Part of the praise comes down to its unique approach to difficulty–a tough souls-like challenge paired with a massive array of Modifiers you can turn on to make the game easier, or even harder, or in some cases, just much weirder.
The Modifiers system is expansive because it offers such meticulous control. Lots of modifiers help adjust the difficulty but many of them adjust it in very particular ways, like helping you with specific aspects of platforming or combat. In an interview, Yacht Club’s David D’Angelo told GameSpot that you can trace the lineage of Mina’s Modifiers all the way back to the Kickstarter campaign for the studio’s debut game, Shovel Knight.
“The whole story of modifiers is that in Shovel Knight we promised ‘secrets only you would know’ in our Kickstarter as one of the backer tiers,” D’Angelo said. “And we didn’t know what that would be. And we got 300 people to back it and we’re like, ‘Oh geez, oh God, we’ve got to come up with 300 secrets. How do we even come up with 300 secrets?'”
The solution, Yacht Club decided, was to make a cheats system in the style of classic Game Genie codes. They were all leaked almost immediately, he said, but it was a joy watching the community share codes and fall in love with cheats again like the old days. But, due to the constraints of the cheat-code system, you couldn’t really turn them on and off, and you could only enable one at a time.
“So when we did Mina, we’re like, ‘How about we just make a menu with it and we’ll do the same idea, we’ll have Genie-style cheats, but you can turn on whatever you want, and that’s fun.'”
D’Angelo explained that this felt like a natural extension of Mina’s design philosophy as an open-ended RPG. You can grind for levels and equipment to become overpowered, or you can play through the whole game with one health and sell all of your equipment to a pawn shop. The Modifiers system reflects that same approach, letting you tweak and customize to a very fine degree.
“In the game, it’s already built to be like you’re modifying the experience in the game,” he added. “And so it didn’t feel incongruent with that. So that’s why we did it.”
For more on Mina the Hollower, be sure to check out our Guides Hub for all the help you could need making your way through the treacherous land of Tenebrous Isle.
