The best part of Mina the Hollower is how it randomizes the Zelda formula

After rolling credits on Mina the Hollower, I did something unusual for me and immediately started a new file. I’m not typically one to replay games right after I beat them. But Mina, a new action-adventure title from Shovel Knight creators Yacht Club Games, offers something that got me to jump right back into a brand-new adventure: a built-in randomizer.

Randomizers shuffle things like items and enemies so that players can experience games they might be very familiar with in a whole new way. Imagine tackling The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but not finding the Kokiri Sword in the chest it’s supposed to be in. A randomizer forces players to adapt on the fly, which can breathe new life into familiar games — and they can be extremely entertaining to watch, especially in races. I’ve always wanted to try one myself, but I haven’t because they’re typically mods for classic games that require a bit of tinkering to set up; having one baked into Mina could open them up to a broader audience.

“I have really gotten into randomizers in the fan community over the past few years,” Sean Velasco, Yacht Club Games cofounder and director on Mina the Hollower, tells The Verge, mentioning randomizers for Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, and one that mixes them together as inspirations. Early on in development, Yacht Club thought adding a randomizer would be fun but also too difficult — basically like making an entire other game, Velasco recalls. However, after building Mina’s saving system for all of the items, “it was easy to track the position of every single item and that meant that we could move them around,” Velasco says. That made it possible to get the randomizer in place.

Mina the Hollower blends elements of retro Zelda adventures like Link’s Awakening with more modern games like Elden Ring, and randomizing things in Mina’s world provides some thorny challenges right from the start. In a normal playthrough, your first consequential decision is to pick from one of three weapons: a whip, a hammer, or two daggers. With the randomizer, however, you’re presented with three random weapons from the total pool of five in the game, so if you had become adept with the whip in your initial run, you might not be able to rely on it early on in your randomizer run.

In a typical playthrough, you also get a health-filling vial shortly after picking your weapon. In the randomizer run, though, you might get a different type of item at that point instead, which makes the beginning of the game much more difficult. In testing, the team had to work out “a lot of kinks,” like making sure you get a key early on to pass through a locked block you’ll encounter. But besides those sorts of potential progression blockers, “we just let it ride,” Velasco says.

I’ve been playing a fresh file of the game with randomizers turned on for the locations of both items and sidearms. I’ve already suffered through situations like not getting a vial at that early point and picking up a nearly useless fishing rod as my first sidearm. I also have a trinket that increases the amount of “bones” that enemies drop — which you can put toward upgrades — but the bones bounce around and often fall into holes, where they disappear.

It might sound like a nightmare, but it’s been a blast. I have to put everything I learned after my initial 20-hour playthrough to the test in interesting ways, including hunting down every hidden treasure that I can remember in hopes that it turns out to be something good.

The randomizer doesn’t always reward these hunts. On more than one occasion, I’ve opened a chest to just get a fishing trophy. But when randomizer gods do smile upon you, it can feel like winning a jackpot. One example: With my trinket that turns on the extra bouncing bones, I knew from my first playthrough that it would pair well with another trinket that magnetized bones toward you. In the back of my head, I hoped I’d stumble upon it on my randomizer run, and through sheer luck, I found it outside the first dungeon I tried.

Thanks to Mina the Hollower’s extensive modifiers system, you can tweak your game, randomized or not, in many other ways, too. You can change Mina’s stats, like her starting attack and defense levels and her HP. At any point, you can turn on modifiers to increase or decrease the game’s difficulty, like giving Mina infinite jumps or forcing her to take triple damage. There are even “weird” modifiers for things like reversing the game’s controls and making the screen spin continuously. (That last one is nauseating.) “Anything that was modifiable, we put it in as a modifier that you could just debug,” Velasco says. “Most of this is debug stuff that we could change as the developers anyway.”

To compete with friends under a certain set of rules, you can share a seed code that lets you each tackle the same world state and see who fares best. And in a post-launch patch, Yacht Club plans to add a modifier that shuffles “warps” — things like doors and holes that let you move from one screen to another — adding even more variety. I have dabbled with the warp randomizer in a beta patch, and it’s just as mind-boggling as you might expect.

And while Yacht Club made three additional campaigns for the main Shovel Knight game, for Mina the Hollower, with the exception of that post-launch patch, the studio isn’t planning to add more. “It’s done,” Velasco says. “We don’t need to keep adding to it.” That means that players who want more Mina will have to make that experience for themselves. Thanks to the randomizer and modifiers, there will be a lot of ways to do that.