Mina grips the hilts of her twin blades as she alights gracefully in the snow beside the wrecked train she’d worked so hard to get back up and running. The fur on her paws ache with exertion from her most recent life-or-death battle, and while she is as victorious as ever, there’s something wrong about how the last one went. Thorne, a friend and former ally to her business partner, Lionel, has turned against her and all the work they’ve done for the prosperity of Tenebrous Isle. She knows she has to press forward, but the pit in her stomach that has nagged her since she began this quest to restore the Spark Generators to their former glory now rises like bile in her throat. She considers, for a moment, throwing up, emptying the contents of her stomach to clear her head for what lies ahead. But when the moment passes she realizes:
She is already hollow.
Mina the Hollower is a game about an inventor on a quest to rescue her life’s work from a state of decay, while slowly coming to realize that the world may need her greatest accomplishments to stay dead. Six Spark Generators have gone dark - massive constructs of Mina’s own design that bring, by some alchemical process, cheap, accessible energy to the residents of Tenebrous Isle. And in their state of dereliction, all hell has broken loose. Monsters roam the streets, bandits terrorize the locals, horrors stalk the cornfields, and back in the apparent safety of Ossex, Baron Lionel asks Mina to help restore order.
So wherefore the hollowing?
Well, in addition to being an inventor, Mina is a Hollower. The in-game manual explains:
The Hollowers are a guild dedicated to studying the earth and its latent resources. By using their special technique, Hollowing*, they can move faster underground than above it! Hollowers have worked for ages to analyze and amplify secrets buried beneath the surface. Mina’s Spark technology is her latest contribution to the Hollowing arts.*
Note: There are many methods to becoming a Hollower, and many applications for the skill. Not all Hollowers agree on how to best utilize their skill.
Hollowers are a fraternal order of spelunking scientists whose one shared quality, beside their evident interest in amplifying the secrets of the earth, is the way they slip and slide beneath its surface. They are diggers. Tunnelers. Excavators.
The game isn’t much interested in interrogating the finer points of Hollower guild membership. There are a few details sprinkled here and there, the most significant of which includes a small, shared guild room beneath Ossex where Mina can kick it with other Hollowers in moments of respite. But by and large, Mina the Hollower prefers evocative gestures toward its eponymous secret society rather than lengthy lore dumps.
Except in one critical aspect: the act of hollowing itself.
Mina the Hollower is a 2D action adventure, but unlike Yacht Club’s previous 2D hit, Shovel Knight, players view the action from a birds eye view, referencing the pixel work and color palette of its Game Boy Advance inspirations. As players guide Mina across Tenebrous Isle, her verbs boil down to a few key points: move, attack, use item, heal, and finally, hollow. Like many action heroines of her ilk, Mina has a standard way of moving - north, south, east, and west at a steady speed - and a secondary mode of movement alongside it. But unlike many of her counterparts, rather than dodge, sprint, or dash, Mina hollows.
When Mina hollows, she disappears beneath the earth’s surface for a few moments, and as the manual suggests, moves in any direction at a greater rate and with greater freedom than her normal, above-ground movement allows. To players, the function of hollowing is similar to a dodge or a sprint - we can use it to avoid attacks or to reposition in the midst of a heated fight. But in other ways, hollowing feels quite new in the hand. Unlike a dash or a dodge, hollowing has a slick, slippery momentum to it in comparison to Mina’s normal traversal. When she disappears underground, the controls loosen up just a bit, and when paired with the visual change from a little warrior mouse bopping about the forest to a much-diminished locomoting molehill, the act of hollowing takes some getting used to.
The skill ceiling of Mina the Hollower derives from the player’s mastery of hollowing, and many of the decisions players are invited to make about Mina’s suite of trinkets and weapons pivot on how they modulate the hollowing experience. Some trinkets increase Mina’s rate of travel while hollowing; others let her stay beneath the surface a little longer. Hollowing-as-traversal is fundamentally the crucial point of contact between player and mouse - it’s what sets the player-avatar relationship apart from any number of other 2D action games. Because it is Mina’s verb, it becomes your verb too, in a much more direct way than if you simply were playing as a character who belonged to the Hollower guild. When I travel the haunting biomes of Tenebrous Isle, I am hollowing.
And in this way, Mina the Hollower invites me to play for a while in the terrain of what it means to hollow.
Polysemy and dissemination are two terms that describe either side of the same semiotic coin. Texts are polysemic when they make, as a core characteristic of their function within language, multiple meanings available to the reader, even if those meanings are contradictory. Polysemic texts often have a “right," hegemonic way to read them, but the tools and materials are always available should you want to read against them. Dissemination, on the other hand, intensifies the idea to completely emancipate the boundaries of meaning within any given text. It’s about the way language always carries an excess of meaning, and how our attempts at representation are always leaking, always throwing off radiation, always obliterating their own intentions.
To be a Hollower is to brand yourself with an exceptionally radioactive bit of that excess. Hollow has noun, verb, adjective, and adverbial forms stuffed within it, all pulling and stretching at each other in a way that makes Mina’s identity feel simultaneously slippery and full of potential.
First there’s the connotation of it. Hollow, the verb, feels like the dark side of scoop; the violent, goth-phase of empty, if you will. As an adjective, the edge softens - you might imagine tap-tapping on the remains of last week’s jack-o-lanterns - but then its pairing with words like rhetoric, threat, or victory brings a near-vampiric quality back to the word, siphoning off the positive affirmative energy of otherwise agentic moments.
Then there’s its contradictory slipperiness, especially as Mina deploys it. You have hollow, the noun, as in, “she has retreated to the safety of that hollow in the tree.” There is hollow, the verb, as in, “she will hollow you out with those blades of hers.” There is hollow, the adverb, as when something rings hollow. Then there is hollow, the adjective, as in, “she found, when the scarecrow’s head rolled to the ground, that it was hollow.”
Then, there’s the form in the game's title: hollower. The first read of this is, of course, as an agent noun. Agent nouns are verbs that we add the -er suffix to in order to create a noun. They make a person out of an action. Mina, the one who Hollows, you might say. There is also hollower as demonym. That is, Mina from the Hollow, or maybe, a resident of Hollow, as a New Yorker is a resident of New York. And finally, there is also the comparative sense of the word. Hollow, hollower, hollowest. Mina, the one who is Hollower than she once was.
But here’s the one that kills me. Merriam Webster gives two primary definitions for “hollow” the verb:
to remove the inside of; to make hollow a hollowed tree hollowing out pumpkins for Halloween
to form by removing the inside of something; to form by making something hollow → usually used with out … rain barrels hollowed out from trees … hollowing out a tunnel
It’s the contranym of it all. To remove is to form. Creation from deletion. Of course, the “making” residing within the “unmaking” is a dramatic irony as old as time. If you’ve seen a sculpture emerge from the stone or felt yourself become something new when the heartache of a betrayal fades, you’ve borne witness to the magic of hollowing.
And yet, despite the unruly overflow of definitions contained within it, Yacht Club has chosen to invest hollow with still another dimension: hollowing as traversal. And in doing so, connects Mina - and me, the player - to the full sense of what hollowing means for heroism, for community, and for political imagination.
Lately, my feeds have been awash in conversations about Millennial Optimism. I am not sure exactly what is meant by this, but the ambiguity is by design, I think. Millennial Optimism speaks to a set of aesthetics and affects that were prevalent during the years immediately preceding and following Barack Obama’s election to the American Presidency in 2008. The intermission between two acts by the names of Patriot and Affordable Care. Talking about Millennial Optimism conjures images of stomp-clap barnyard weddings, neon-colored Ke$ha themed New Year’s parties, long scarves and skinny jeans, and the rise of the Pumpkin Spice Latte.
Setting aside my own experiences of those years which were punctuated too frequently by visits to inpatient mental health clinics and difficult funerals, Millennial Optimism is a parody of my generation’s collective political losses, repurposed to conjure, against all odds, the feeling of a future for those who have grown up without the luxury one. It’s a parody because it’s all LMFAO and fun., no Bon Iver or The National. It’s Ryan Seacrest without Craig Ferguson; Guy Fieri without Bourdain. Millennial Optimism empties the aesthetics, sounds, and cultural shibboleths of that era of the material conditions which produced them, creating in its place a new historical imaginary, flat and shiny for residents of the murky future.
This is, of course, the theft that every generation performs on its predecessors, not a unique crime against us olds. Even so, it is strange to wake up every day and see this effigy of my memories held up, hollowed of its sorrows. I can admit to feeling nostalgic every now and then for “Little Lion Man”, but this Millennial Optimism is a corpse to me. I cannot recognize the new form these cultural artifacts have taken with their insides scooped out, guts festooning Gen Z’s wistful, short-form ennui.
And, of course I wouldn’t see the joy in the parody: I have, myself, been hollowed by the years since 2008. The million little regrets, failures, and disappointments which have deflated the aspirations of my twenties are the very things which have been excised, like an abscess, from the songs, books, and movies I used to love. And, having had no choice but to continue taking shape with all of my mistakes and wounds clinging to me, Millennial Optimism resembles a sleep paralysis demon to my senses more than it does a halcyon bit of fun.
You could read Mina the Hollower as the collapse that has always lived within the idea of Millennial Optimism, if you wanted. The game’s sweet and nostalgic art direction work in lockstep with its attentive reinterpretation of 90s lo-fi, Zelda-style adventures to tug at Millennial daydreams of gaming in the backseat of their mom’s station wagon rather than doom scrolling on the couch. But its tone, narrative, and themes undercut that nostalgia, refusing to offer the heroic triumph those old games might have given us as kids. Instead, Mina deflates the homage, updating it to keep with hollower times.
Mina’s story is built around a long, slow, telegraphed betrayal. As she treks from Spark Tower to Spark Tower she confronts a steadily growing body of evidence that her sponsor and former business partner, Baron Lionel, isn’t the benevolent leader he pretends to be. Three times, Mina fights Thorne, an old colleague and friend, who pleads with her to wake up and see Lionel’s villainy. She rejects his warnings, pushing instead through with Lionel’s bidding to repair the Spark Towers, maybe because she doesn’t want to face the destruction her own work has wrought, maybe because she still has faith in the goodness of her old business partner. Whatever her reasons, Lionel betrays her in the end, attempting first to recruit her to crush the rebellion she’s no longer certain deserves, then reciting a litany of her sins - sins that I helped her commit - before turning violently against her.
Mina defeats Lionel, of course, but only after Thorne returns in a new, monstrous form to aid her efforts. The battle begins at ground level, then scales the Spark Generator at the heart of Ossex, before finally coming to a crescendo atop the spire. There, I draw on everything I’ve learned to fend off Lionel’s onslaught. It’s a brutal fight, in part because it features something that’s been missing from the game up to this point - companionship. Mina and Thorne take turns shielding each other from Lionel’s blows, creating openings for attacks and shelter for defense. Finally, the Baron goes down, no longer the imposing, well-dressed magnate he’d always been, now revealed as a fallen god, torn asunder in the sky.
The victory, like the soil beneath Mina’s feet, is hollow. Mina is not welcomed back to her community as a hero, but as a terrorist. The townsfolk try to string her up, heedless of the many heroic sidequests she accomplished in their name along the way. She is greeted so viciously, in fact, that slings and arrows follow her to the very docks themselves. She barely escapes with her life. And so, she floats away unloved, unappreciated, and alone - her reputation in tatters and her home left in a state of ruin that she can only hope will begin to heal without her.
And there the game ends, one solitary Hollower, fleeing wreckage and rage, washed up on a foreign shore.
More than anything, Mina the Hollower is a game about the moral necessity of excising the fictions which prop up prosperity that was unjustly won. It is about what happens to those brave enough to wield the scalpel and the mutual hollowing that occurs between them and their world. Every time Mina disappears into the dust, I’m reminded of the subterranean work that foments revolution, the difficult slipperiness of that work when it is out of sight. I’m also reminded of the temptation to refashion history according to whatever prosperous now we might try to imagine - Millennial Optimism without Millennial Depression. Only a hollower can recognize the truth in a story whose beating heart has been scooped out and fed to the sin-eaters.
For all the turbulent meanings that collide within its title, Mina the Hollower anchors the rich polysemy of hollow in the verbs it offers me, the player, through its tragic heroine. It teaches me how to hollow, for what purposes, and in what places. It lets me linger in the emotional fallout of being hollowed out and then in the slow discovery of what it is that I’ve become instead.
The final scene sees Mina drag herself to the center of a tiny, ramshackle islet where, scarred but still breathing, lay Thorne, still enormous and hideous from Lionel’s corruption. Mina pulls up beside him, opens her potion flask, and heals him. Against all odds, his monstrous form reverts. In a few moments, Thorne is back to his old self, hollowed out, of course, like Mina from the devastation of these last few days, but alive and somehow new. The scene’s perspective rises into the sky, Tenebrous Isle in the distance, no longer the beacon for scientific and industrial progress it once was, but perhaps, all the better for it.