Procedural Sword Generator #Proceduralgeneration #Swordgenerator #Unitypackage #Gamedevelopment #Sworddesign #Customization #Lowpoly #Fantasyrpg #Actionadventuregames #AssetStore

https://u3dn.com/packages/procedural-sword-generator-275281

Mina the Hollower: Most Excellent Action-Adventure Romp 🐭

From indie legends Yacht Club Games, here we have the action-adventure game Mina the Hollower. It launched on 29th May 2026 on PC and all consoles, with instant rave reviews and much other excellence.

It’s a fantastic game and it’s available on all consoles and PC. It’s styled like a Game Boy Colour type romp, clearly influenced by Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, but delivers a modernised gameplay experience with much joy.

GBA Style Adventuring in Mina the Hollower

Yeah, so this is like an overhauled version of Nintendo’s Link’s Awakening (1993) on the Game Boy. Specifically, the GBA version Link’s Awakening DX (1998) that brought colour to the previously black and white world.

Yacht Club Games is already a legend for its take on ’90s NES games. The studio is in Los Angeles and made its name with the legendary Shovel Knight (2014) and various spin-offs.

In fact, Mina the Hollower is its first non-Shovel Knight universe based outing.

This time out, players take control of the mouse Mina. She’s a genius inventor and a Hollower who travels to the island of Tenebrous via boat to investigate why one of her inventions (Spark Generators) are broken. Hollowers are members of a fabled guild dedicated to studying and science.

Once she arrives on Tenebrous, Mina finds all hell has broken loose. It’s up to her to head out and restore equilibrium to the land etc. A fine set up for some fine action-adventuring action. Behold!

Yacht Club Games is famous for its phenomenal attention to detail. Its commitment to the retro aesthetic of the ’90s era of gaming goes as far as using original technology to create soundtracks.

You can see all that love and attention paying off in Mina the Hollower. Every element has been fine-tuned to deliver an authentic retro gaming styled experience… right down to the notorious ’90s era level of often absurd difficulty.

The core action involves Zelda style dungeon exploring, with some badass bosses to take on. Some of these are mind-numbingly difficult (unfortunately).

This would be very off-putting for us, but the studio has been a dear and done the right thing.

Unlike other more obnoxious indie devs (*ahem* Team Cherry with Silksong), Yacht Club Games offers extensive accessibility options. Lovingly so. You can make the game as easy, or hard, as you please. As in, gamers get to choose how they’d like to play (please pay attention, Team Cherry) and it’s not about tedious “git gud” elitism.

That helps a great deal, then, but whilst the studio is famed for its attention to detail, its first action-adventure game isn’t perfect. There’s a great deal of backtracking a lot of the time.

Meaning, the area design isn’t as tight as it could be. Thinking of the first dungeon in Nintendo’s A Link to the Past (1992) and it’s a masterpiece of game design. It flows perfectly and then dumps players out the front after you’ve completed it. Zero backtracking.

Mina the Hollower isn’t quite as polished, but this is a small indie team we’re on about and it doesn’t have the same budget as Nintendo to mess around with.

What it can focus on is the budget-friendly retro details. Alongside the pixel art that’s so livingly created, the soundtrack by Jake Kaufman and Yuzo Koshiro has all the bleeps and bloops you could need.

The good news is, after six years of hard work, the game sold 300,000 copies in three days. Yacht Club Games has previously said the game was make-or-break for the studio should it sell “only” 100,00 copies.

That highlights how precarious the video game market is right now.

And this is one of the more successful indie devs, 12 years into its success story with the Shovel Knight franchise. Game design is expensive and the market on edge, but the £16 ($20) asking price has helped shift a lot of copies. 300,000 meaning Yacht Club Games should be safe and sound for now.

Which is great, as it keeps doing fantastic work like this. Mina the Hollower isn’t quite a 5/5 from us, but it’s damn close and offers around 20+ hours of excellent entertainment for all types of gamers. Not to be sniffed at. 🐭

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (PS5)

I’ve been playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I found the game on the PS Store bundled with the new Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. It was on the 30th anniversary of Playstation herself, when we got the nice themes dedicated to all generations of Playstation consoles. I’m currently using the PS3 theme on my home screen! As for Fallen Order, it was a seamless transition from Uncharted. It’s an action/adventure game, with some puzzles, but far fewer than in Uncharted, and much easier to solve. 

It was my first time playing a Star Wars game, and I enjoyed it. My references to Star Wars come from the trilogy running from 1977 to 1983, which I saw more than 100 times on a VHS tape that has now deteriorated. Those are the movies I refer to as “the first three movies” or “the original trilogy.” Or I could say that I prefer episodes IV to VI, but I prefer not to. I haven’t been much into Star Wars since then, and even though I watched the rest of the series, I don’t remember any of it.

The parkour in Fallen Order can be tricky in some sections. Fortunately, we can keep trying because we don’t actually die and return to a checkpoint, thank god. Despite being akin to a soulslike, the game is as soulslike as you want it to be, in a sense. I didn’t want it to have that extra layer of difficulty, so I lowered the settings to a level that I felt comfortable with. Additionally, it is a metroidvania. Some sections of the map can’t be explored the first time we visit a new area/planet, some doors are locked from the other side, bridges are raised, ropes are held up high or too far away, ledges are too high to reach, etc. All this will be traversable with new Jedi powers that our character Cal Kestis will be able to remember from his former master. At this point in the game, I have all planets explored well above 50% with some around 90%. I will not 100% the game, but I’m satisfied with the level of exploration I’ve been able to achieve on my own.

After a certain point I had to force myself to learn how to read what passes for a map in this game. Like in any metroidvania, mastering the map is very important to access new areas, especially in planets like Zeffo, where the labyrinth is intricate, with many secret areas, shortcuts, treasure, you name it. It’s not possible to fast travel directly back to the Mantis or between checkpoints, therefore we should expect a lot of backtracking, especially during exploration and after new areas are accessible. Reaching new areas is mostly fine when all shortcuts are unlocked, but still, traveling to an area farther from the ship means we should travel the whole way back and most likely get lost in the process.

Enter the map. It’s a holomap accessible through BD-1 (our little, cutest and sweetest droid) and as the name implies it’s a monochromatic 3D map. The tonalities go from darker blue to lighter blue. The background is also blue. Since it’s a hologram, we can still see the environment in the background when we check the map, which adds an extra layer of visual noise. It’s possible to rotate, zoom in and out, all that good stuff, but properly reading it is a pain. 

Due to the elevation we can cycle between different area levels. They’re represented with a lighter tone of blue. Hovering the cursor on a given area highlights that section. Sometimes I had to zoom all the way in because the map was so packed with layers and I couldn’t understand how to proceed. I don’t think this solution is very user-friendly or eye-friendly. A few more accessibility settings could have helped people get a better look at these maps. After we get the abilities to freeze, push, or pull objects, as well as the ability to wall run and double jump (almost at the end) things get a little easier to navigate. As previously mentioned, we can’t fast travel between checkpoints, and the map will remain our best friend, for better or worse.

Since it took me so long to finish this post, I eventually finished the main story. In terms of collectibles and explored areas I got a respectable 88% exploration mark. The exploration was extremely satisfying, as was the combat and all the new Jedi powers and abilities I unlocked throughout the game. 

In hindsight, I think some characters like Merrin were introduced a bit too late in the story, which leads me to conclude that I should have visited Dathomir first, maybe? Regardless, at the start I wouldn’t have had access to most traversal abilities. I’d like to have seen her bonding with the rest of the crew for a longer period.

I’m not going over the whole story here, only a few highlights: the strained relationship between Cere and the Second Sister – a Jedi inquisitor who was once her Padawan – demonstrated how different one’s path can be when fighting against the dark side from a place of freedom versus getting coerced into it by the Empire, with only a few remnants of a former sense of self left. Then, the connection between Cal and Cere, which I found very meaningful, when they were learning to trust each other and navigating their own challenges with the Force and what it meant to live the path of a Jedi. Basically, I enjoyed everything about Greez and BD-1 – respectively, the best ship captain and the cutest, most resourceful droid. The Jedi Holocron served as only part of the journey and not the objective in itself, and finally, Cal recovering the memories of his training and overcoming his past trauma brings many moments of his self-healing journey to us. I think these were the aspects of the main story that stuck with me. We can find many more details about the lore in the Databank and Tactical Guide.

Well, writing a text that started mainly with a rant about the map made me realize that I actually enjoyed the game! I had genuine fun with it, and now I’m looking forward to playing Survivor and seeing where the story takes me.

#actionAdventureGames #actionGames #adventureGames #BD1 #calKestis #exploration #gaming #jedi #metroidvania #planets #playstation5 #puzzle #soulslikes #starWars #starWarsJediFallenOrder #storyRich #VideoGames

Odin Sphere: Two dimensions is more than enough

It's a 2D side-scrolling action RPG about a brave Valkyrie and her overbearing father, Odin.

https://chasingdings.com/2024/11/27/odin-sphere-two-dimensions-is-more-than-enough/

#ActionAdventureGames #ActionRPG #PS2 #PS4 #RPG #atlus #OdinSphere #ps3