I absolutely loved this game. I went into this without ever even having played Yacht Club's Shovel Knight (but now I definitely need to). I remember seeing a trailer for it and thinking "Hmm this kind of reminds me of Links Awakening DX or the Oracle games from Zelda". And the only reason I was interested at that point because I loved those games. Closer to release I kept hearing more buzz and seeing more gameplay so I gave it a shot without many expectations and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what an absolute surprise and pleasure this game has been.

I think this game gets almost everything right on what I consider it takes to be a GOOD video game. Let's start with the gameplay. Mina has a totally unique burrow mechanic that lets her jump then land and dig underground to move around before emerging. While she's underground, she's invulnerable to damage and you can move her around and control when you can jump back out. It feels weird at first because there's nothing else like it but once you get used to it, once it clicks, you will love it. The game is obviously designed completely around the mechanic and by the end you'll be an expert at burrowing to complete both tricky platforming and avoid enemy attacks.

Besides her awesome burrowing mechanic, Mina also is able to wield 1 of 5 weapons. A whip straight of castlevania, a giant hammer, a megabuster-esque weapon you can switch between a melee and ranged mode, dual weilding high dps daggers, and a giant coffin shield that can parry. They all play completely differently and have additional upgrades that introduce mechanics that change up how they play. For example, the weapon I used my entire playthrough was the hammer(called BLASTSTRIKE MAUL) which lets you upgrade it to have AOE explosions on your charge attacks AND a follow up attack where you spin the head of the hammer after slamming it down. The combat of the game with the enemies and bosses is challenging so getting good with these weapons feels super rewarding. Beyond these 5 weapons, you also get a handful of subweapons that all do different things. Some of them help you traverse giant gaps, some of them summon familiar that drain resources for you. You will definitely have favorites by the end. Finally, Mina can also find/buy/equip trinkets. Trinkets are accessories that can completely change your "build". Some are combat focused, letting you revive once per checkpoint, or letting you do aoe damage when you emerge from burrowing. Others are exploration or traversal focused, like rewarding you more bones (this games version of xp/currency) per enemy kill, or letting you dash in the air after a jump. The trinkets all do completely different things and theres a TON of them. You also slowly find more and more slots to equip multiple trinkets and further refine your build.

The game for me was perfectly balanced. At the beginning when I was still learning the feel of Mina and the weapons, I was getting my ass beat. But as I got more familiar with the mechanic, and after I leveled up a few times and found some amazing trinkets, the game fell into a perfect groove of tension and payoff.

It was such a joy to explore every area in this game. I HATE when I'm playing a game and something is so obscure or unexplained that I have to pull out my phone and pull up a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wiki page or a guide written by some NERD to figure out what I need to do. In my nearly 40 hour first playthrough of Mina, I never had to look up a guide once. The game naturally teaches you it's tells. Here's what a crack in the wall might look like, here's how you might be able to burrow to cross a bigger gap, hey you might be missing this part on the edge of the screen that goes to a hidden screen. If you pay attention, the game always rewards you with something worthwhile. Maybe a treasure, maybe a combat encounter that ends in a boss, maybe you find an npc to lend a hand. You can just organically find this stuff without having to resort to a guide. The aforementioned trinkets are also so different that the desire to find new ones in the game further drives your exploration (you also find bones, upgrades for your flasks, additional trinket slots, weapon upgrades, and fish cause theres a fishing minigame, hell ya).

The game has a main hub area as well with NPCs that will point you towards certain secrets in the nearby areas. Then later when you're exploring that area and you see something that reminds you and you remember to do it, you feel so good. You found that ♥♥♥♥. There is no room by room map either. Instead you can eventually get an OVERALL map of an area which you can then further upgrade later in the game to tell you if you've found all of the collectables in an area. The result is, when you're in an area for the first time, you're not constantly opening a menu to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ check things off a list. You're actually paying attention using your own eyes, taking in the level design and finding ♥♥♥♥ on your own and focusing on the combat. And then later on, you get the checklist to help you see if you found everything but you still have to FIND it yourself.

If all this game had was this amazing gameplay loop of exploring these big areas, learning how to traverse the unique environment in each and also learning how to deal with the new enemies and bosses, it would be a pretty damn good game. But it goes further for me by having an amazing soundtrack, art direction, and atmosphere. The entire OST is full of bangers and the sprites, both in-game and during cutscenes , the animations, it's also made with love and looked phenomenal on my oled steam deck. Playing the entire game on a handheld also really brought back memories of playing oracle of seasons on my gbsp way back when. The story isn't trying to be a novel or anything but it's also not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ throwaway story either. I thought it was great full of cool memorable ♥♥♥♥ and it pushes you to the end to see through its conclusion. The characters, both the main ones and the side characters, hell even the npcs running around the town, I really liked a lot of them. It's a really well done game.

I think if you like video games, you will like this game. There really is no reason anyone shouldn't like this game. Scared about the difficulty? There's a billion different ingame accessibility options out there (though enabling those will disable achievements if you care). Think it looks too old and youre too grown up to play an 8bit looking game with a mouse girl? Get the ♥♥♥♥ over yourself, this game mogs 98% of all major first party AAA game released in the past 2 decades easily. And you'll actually want to replay it instead of thinking about replaying and remembering that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ part where you had to walk through a crack in the wall slowly while some npc exposition dumps and yaps solutions for the games puzzles.

10/10 Masterpiece.