Mina the Hollower's creators put "Game Genie cheats" in their Zelda Soulslike mashup

Mina the Hollower looks a lot like an old-school Zelda game, and indeed, that was a key source of inspiration for Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games. But the retro-inspired RPG, which will be released tomorrow for all platforms, has some key differences from its Game Boy Color roots. For one thing, Mina the Hollower stars a female character — which, back in the day, would have been quite the rarity. But also, a lot of games back then were extremely difficult. Mina the Hollower can be a similarly punishing challenge — unless you choose to engage with its massive suite of modification tools, in which case you can experience the precise level of friction that you desire.

According to David D’Angelo, a programmer at Yacht Club Games, the extensive game modifiers were always on the table for Mina. It all started with the studio’s 2014 hit Shovel Knight and, specifically, a promise made to that game’s Kickstarter backers to create secret codes for select players. “We had to figure out a way to come up with 300 secrets,” said D’Angelo. “Which we ended up doing old school style, like you put in your file name cheat codes… we just thought of them like Game Genie cheats, like, ‘oh, this one will make you jump really high,’ ‘this will make all the guys twice as big,’ that kind of stuff.” And so, when the team was developing Mina the Hollower, they continued that tradition — “just like, here's another fun way you can control the experience for yourself.”