10 Similarities (and Differences) Between Mina the Hollower and Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is an action platformer, while Mina the Hollower is an open-world action-RPG, but they both take inspiration from particular retro games like Mega Man and The Legend of Zelda, respectively. As Shovel Knight was Yacht Club’s first game, it taught its crew a lot about putting certain mechanics together, some of which you can see as you play through Mina's adventure. Of course, they’re not exactly the same game, as that wouldn’t be very interesting, so there are just as many distinct differences between the two titles.

10 Similarity: Hub Areas

Safe Havens

Both Mina the Hollower’s Tenebrous Isle and Shovel Knight’s Valley are absolutely crawling with dangerous terrain and hostile critters, which is why it’s so important to have at least one safe haven where you can catch your breath and improve your abilities. Both games have at least one definitive hub area where you can do both of these things, not to mention explore a bit for secrets and potentially unlock new features and services.

Mina’s primary place of sanctuary is the central city of Ossex, where you can find shops for upgrading stats, buying new weapons, and just generally mingling with the populace to get hints about the isle. Shovel Knight, meanwhile, visits the unnamed Village after the game’s first stage to avail himself of similar resources. While the initial village doesn’t have all the same features as Ossex, the game’s second settlement, the Armor Outpost, makes up the difference with the remainder. Amusingly, in both games, hub areas have numerous civilian NPCs milling about, whom you can bother for hints and silly dialogue.

9 Difference: Open World

Mina Goes Where She Wants

Shovel Knight’s primary inspirations are Mega Man and the NES DuckTales game, which both had strictly stage-based formats. As such, Shovel Knight also uses a stage format, with its areas broken up into levels accessed by an overworld map screen. You can revisit levels at your leisure and travel between previously-accessed areas relatively easily, but I wouldn’t exactly call it an “open world.”

Mina the Hollower, meanwhile, takes inspiration from the Game Boy Legend of Zelda games, some of the best on the platform, which center around a more-or-less seamless open world. From Ossex, you’re free to go in pretty much whatever direction you want, notwithstanding progression blockers like unlocked abilities or doors blocked by Spark slots. There is definitely an order of operations to the game’s major areas, but you can also freely walk back to Ossex from just about any portion of any area, especially if you’re opening shortcuts as you go.

8 Similarity: Subweapons

Both Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower take a couple of pages out of the Castlevania playbook, with both of the titular heroes utilizing a variety of subweapons in addition to their primary armaments. While Mina’s have a more gothic steampunk vibe to them, you can see some shared concepts between the two.

For example, both have traversal-centric subweapons, the Mobile Gear in Shovel Knight’s case and the Iron Steed for Mina, and both possess defensive items that let them phase through foes, the Phase Locket for Shovel Knight and the Mist Jar for Mina. Both heroes even have their own Fishing Rods, which allow both of them to fish up catches containing valuable recovery items and cash even in spots where you wouldn’t think fishing would be possible, such as a puddle or the side of a cliff. Both games also use a shared energy system to determine how many times you can use subweapons, though in Mina’s case, hers are lost in the event of her death, whereas Shovel Knight can freely swap between them in his inventory.

7 Difference: Weapons

…But Not All Tools

While both Shovel Knight and Mina make extensive use of secondary equipment, when it comes to their main means of self-defense, Shovel Knight is a little more committed to his main shtick, the Shovel Blade. He wouldn’t exactly be a “Shovel Knight” if he swung around anything besides a literal shovel, now would he? While he can upgrade his shovel with various new techniques and tweaks, it’s always Shovel Knight’s primary means of attack.

Meanwhile, despite her game’s art most frequently depicting her with her spiked flail, the Nightstar, Mina has five different primary weapons at her disposal, including a massive hammer, swift daggers, and a battery-powered arm cannon. Mina can unlock and upgrade these weapons independently of each other and swap between them at any Underlab, which allows you to tweak and experiment with your combat style whenever you want. Unlike with the Shovel Blade, which you have no choice but to get good with, if one of Mina’s weapons isn’t working for you, just use a different one.

6 Similarity: Traversal Abilities

Bounce it Here, Dig it There

I wonder if it was a coincidence or a deliberate choice to have the protagonists of Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower both specialize in digging. I’d guess the latter, personally, but hey, it’s a surprisingly flexible skillset, so you might as well use it.

Both Shovel Knight’s bounce ability and Mina’s signature burrowing ability revolve around the concepts of digging and bouncing, albeit in slightly different ways. Shovel Knight can bounce off the ground to disturb cracked walls and patches of dirt, revealing more space beneath, while Mina can burrow horizontally along the ground to slip under narrow obstacles and pick up objects from beneath. While the abilities are different in that regard, they also both encourage their users to bounce off of certain environmental elements in order to get around. Both games make extensive use of bouncing on and over hazardous terrain like bottomless pits, though in Mina’s case, falling down a pit just respawns you with some deducted health, while Shovel Knight dies instantly.

5 Difference: Perspective

From the Top-Down

Shovel Knight is a strictly 2D platforming affair, with our hero only able to run left and right and occasionally move upward or downward if the level permits it. In the majority of cases, though, going up goes nowhere, and going down leads to instant death. The point of Shovel Knight’s levels is always to get from point A to point B, occasional secret passages leading to chests and collectibles notwithstanding, so there’s no real reason to complicate things.

As an open-world adventure game, Mina the Hollower uses a top-down perspective, allowing you to freely navigate in eight directions. While the flow of the major areas is technically linear, they’re also a lot more mazelike, with a lot of shortcuts and crossing passages, something that wouldn’t really work in an exclusively 2D plane. This layout also allows Mina the Hollower to get a little craftier with its own secrets, placing entrances to them several screens away to make you navigate compact gauntlets or find secret weak spots to break for passageway.

4 Similarity: Currency

It Makes the World Go ‘Round

If there were one thing I distinctly remember from playing Shovel Knight, it would be the veritable mountain of treasure I regularly uncovered, something which I’ve also experienced in Mina the Hollower. I guess Yacht Club understands very well that, even as far back as the earliest days of retro gaming that its titles take inspiration from, people liked seeing numbers go up.

Both Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower are jam-packed with opportunities to accumulate massive quantities of treasure and Bones, respectively, as well as opportunities to spend it all in shops on useful items and upgrades. Both games also have mechanics where repeated deaths will cost you all the cash you’re carrying; in Shovel Knight’s case, dying causes you to drop floating treasure sacks that disappear if you die again, whereas Mina holds onto her Bones until she dies again without any Sparks, after which all of her Bones are lost.

3 Difference: Leveling

Mina Invests in Herself

While both Shovel Knight and Mina the Hollower give you lots of miscellaneous stuff to spend your currency on, the latter does something distinctly different that the former doesn’t: let you invest your cash directly into your character. Mina’s Bones aren’t just a regular currency, they also pull double duty as an experience mechanic, automatically triggering a level up (AKA a Bone Up) upon crossing a particular threshold. When leveling, you can improve Mina’s attack, defense, and subweapon efficacy right on the spot, restoring all of your health in the process.

While Shovel Knight can invest his treasure to upgrade his capabilities, it’s only at specific shopkeepers in the Village and Armor Outpost, and only in very specific ways. These include upgrading his health and magic at the Village, and purchasing new armor with distinctive effects and new Shovel Blade techniques at the Armor Outpost. There is no way to directly increase Shovel Knight’s baseline damage-dealing or damage-receiving capabilities, even with treasure, so you have to rely more on your skills and finesse than progressing stats.

2 Similarity: Music

Jake Kaufman Never Misses

One of the most legendary names in chiptune music is Jake Kaufman, also known as Virt. He’s been a sort of unofficial artist-in-house for Wayforward for a good while, though he was also the composer for Shovel Knight’s entire soundtrack, which also happened to be one of that game’s best qualities. With that in mind, it was kind of a given that he’d be brought back on board for Mina the Hollower’s soundtrack, where he could once again bring his distinctive chiptune beats to the forefront.

Much like Shovel Knight, Mina the Hollower features an extensive chiptune soundtrack for all of its major map areas, plus a variety of incidental tracks for cutscenes and one-off setpieces. In fact, another similarity Mina the Hollower has with Shovel Knight is its in-game music player. In Shovel Knight, you could bring lost music sheets to the bard in the village to listen to them whenever you want, while Mina can purchase a phonograph for her Underlabs and play music on recovered records there.

1 Difference: Recovery

Troupple Chalices Aren’t Economical

In any given level, Shovel Knight has two primary means of recovering lost health: picking up random bits of food off the ground or hidden in walls, or consuming recovery ichor from one of his Troupple Chalices. You have to go back to the Troupple King to refill that ichor after it’s used, so it’s not really something you can rely upon indefinitely. You just have to be vigilant for food whenever it crops up, and just generally try not to take damage as much as you can.

Mina the Hollower takes a few cues from the Soulslike genre, Bloodborne in particular, through the game’s Plasma and Vial system. Mina has a stash of Vials on her person, refilled at Underlabs, which can be used to restore her health on the spot a limited number of times. However, rather than being able to just use them whenever, she first has to build up the yellow Plasma meter on her health bar by either attacking enemies or picking up Plasma Roses. Compared to Shovel Knight, Mina has a greater degree of general survivability in this regard, but her system also forces her to get right up in enemies’ faces instead of trying to play keep-away, encouraging risk and reward gameplay.