Mina the Hollower has a total of seven main dungeons. The last dungeon is always the last dungeon, but the other six can be tackled in any order, despite the fact that the “intended” sixth dungeon is significantly harder, longer, and more confusing than any of the five prior. And yet, if you know what you’re doing or are incredibly lucky, you can walk right into the winding, deadly, rainbow-soaked Astral Orrery before you’ve even touched the baby-easy Queensbury Crypt.
“Why let players do this?” I asked Yacht Club Games programmer David D’Angelo and designer Alec Faulkner.
“Why would we stop them?” was Faulkner’s cheeky reply.
I spoke to D’Angelo and Faulkner a few weeks ago, just after the release of Mina the Hollower. The first half of our conversation is already published, but for the second half, I specifically wanted to talk about the game’s ending: its final two dungeons, its climactic final scenes, and an incredible twist near the conclusion that calls into question everything you’ve done up to that point.
If you haven’t beaten Mina the Hollower yet and intend to, I’d recommend staying out of this interview until you have, because we’re going full spoilers with it. You’ve been warned.
[Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.]
While you can make Astral Orrery the first dungeon you complete in Mina the Hollower, it’s hard to do. Assuming no ridiculous speedrunning tricks (and assuming you’re not playing on New Game+ with modifiers), you can visit Astral Orrery only after exploring three other areas of the game first to find hidden mirrors (there are four, only three are needed to move forward). And of course, you have to actually know the “trick” of the mirrors: that you can simply walk inside them to find the hidden mirror world where Astral Orrery is located. Most players won’t learn the trick until they’ve seen it performed in front of them a few times, blink-and-you-miss it, when walking into a room with a mirror. Or worst-case scenario, after beating all the other dungeons, when the newspaper just tells you to walk into the mirror.
But still. If you can figure it out, and if you want to, you can do it. D’Angelo says that’s the point. That’s what Yacht Club wanted to do with the entire game.
“The ethos of the game from the beginning was we’re going to make an RPG, which is a game where you can control the equipment of the character, the level of the character, you can control where you go, your play style, depending on your weapon,” he says. “So for us, it was, ‘let’s push it to the max in every area we can.’ We want to make sure you can go anywhere at any time. You can find any item any time.
“…When I played Link to the Past or Link’s Awakening growing up or the original Zelda, I would finish the game, and often you immediately went into Master Quest or just played it again. You played it again because you said, ‘oh, I bet I could take the hookshot into the other dungeon. That would be neat, right?’ So we just wanted to encourage that as much as possible.”
There are dozens of little decisions like this peppered throughout Mina the Hollower. There’s the Pawn Shop, where you can sell literally any item you pick up, including health upgrades or main weapons, for the game’s Bone currency. Then you can spend that to kit yourself out with upgrades from the shops to become super powerful, or cash it all in to repair the train and do Coltrane Peak, another “intended” late-game level, as early as you like. Barriers like the bone cost and the mirrors are in place to discourage casual players who aren’t looking for shortcuts from accidentally stumbling into things too difficult for them, but those determined enough can always find a way through.
Or turn on the game’s cheats, and barrel on through anyway.
“People have just been flipping out over these modifiers, and it’s just, like—it’s the same thing,” D’Angelo says. “We put 300 fun things or whatever in there for you to control the same way we did in the game, right? We’re letting you have fun.”
Apart from discouraging players from inadvertently tripping into difficult content too early, the mirror entrance to Astral Orrery came about because the team wanted there to be a big “mystery” around its penultimate dungeon, Faulkner says. They wanted a big reveal, a “holy shit” moment, where players realize there was something right in front of them the entire time. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the big main mirror and the first and only one that we initially put in the game is right there in the foyer of the mansion,” he continues. “It’s, like, the most obvious thing immediately in front of you.”
The Astral Orrery is visually inspired a bit by the color dungeon from Link’s Awakening DX, and a little bit of Super Mario World‘s Star Road. There’s a “bonus”-y feel to it, despite it being required to complete the game. That’s because it was technically a Kickstarter stretch goal, even though D’Angelo says Yacht Club always intended to make it, even if it wasn’t funded.
Faulkner cuts in here to say there was one conversation about cutting it. What happened? “Time and money,” he says.
Apparently, Astral Orrery and the final dungeon were “the crappiest in the game” when Mina the Hollower was delayed from its original Halloween 2025 release date. Neither was even close to being done, he says. When I express surprise, given the incredibly complex mechanics of the four distinct sections of the Orrery, Faulkner clarifies that the base mechanics were already in place. The dungeon just wasn’t fun at the time.
I bring up my awe at one mechanic in particular: there’s a section where you can flip switches to turn on black holes throughout each room, some of which are actively moving. Mina can jump over the black holes like any other gap, meaning when they intersect with walls, she can leap through walls that would normally block her from proceeding.
“I’m still in shock that David was like, ‘Yeah, we can do that,’” Faulkner said. “‘We can disable the collision. You can jump through the wall.’”
But I’ve gushed enough about the Orrery. Clearing the six main dungeons fully reveals the treachery of Mina’s patron, Lionel, and triggers the beginning of the end. Thorne, the up-till-now presumed villain now driven berserk by Lionel, attacks the town, and you have to fight through him to get to the manor. Or do you? I, like most players, battled him till he grabbed me in his big bat mouth, dropped me, and left. But apparently, I didn’t have to fight him at all. You can ignore him and run straight to the manor. Or you can stand and watch him tear up the town for a bit—if you leave him alone long enough, he’ll eventually just leave.
“We don’t want you to feel forced to do something that is bad,” D’Angelo says. “We played other games like that, and I don’t want to play a game if you’re going to make me do the wrong thing. So like with the generators, you have to fix them all. Part of that, you’re probably thinking, ‘This isn’t a good idea.’ But part of the plot is that you gotta fix ’em all to [shut them down] anyway. No matter what, the good thing is fixing them all. So with [Thorne], we don’t want you to feel forced to fight a good guy.”
Mina the Hollower, from the outside, doesn’t seem like a game where complex moral choices might matter in any real way. There are a number of moments throughout the game where Mina has the opportunity to do something morally questionable, like locking a guy in a tomb to suffocate (he asks you to) or murdering a sapient leaf (on accident) or having a battle with her rival that crashes a train into a mountain (oops), or drowning a fisherman (I tried to save him) or stealing from orphans (okay that one was bad). Many of these moments are played off for laughs, or brushed aside in the way video games frequently do. Mina’s the hero, after all! If a few trains crash and kill a few people, what of it? She’s saving the world! It’s a game! Don’t think too hard about it!
But Mina the Hollower‘s big twist is that these moments did matter, a secret that isn’t revealed until Mina reaches Lionel’s banquet hall. D’Angelo tells me Yacht Club envisioned Lionel’s manor as a bit like Hyrule Castle: a hub from which you went out into the world, then at the end returned to where you started for an epic confrontation. Their original idea was very cinematic, with a camera panning down the table highlighting the tension between Lionel and Mina. But then they had to answer the question of what the two former-friends said to one another. Mina, of course, confronts Lionel over the evil he’s perpetuating by keeping the generators lit.
And in an incredible, Chrono Trigger-evoking moment, Lionel turns the spotlight back on Mina, listing (with the help of the townspeople gathered around) every crime she’s committed up to that point in the game, every murdered leaf, every crashed train, every disconsolate orphan, every fisherman left to drown, every smashed candlestick, every “kick the can” game Mina interrupted. It’s a truly stand-out scene.
“When we thought about what he should say, he’s turning you against the people,” D’Angelo says. “And how should he turn you against the people? When you say that, the immediate thing that comes to mind is Chrono Trigger, right? It’s just like Chrono Trigger, it’s the one game where you get put in front of a bunch of people and you’re like, ‘What? I didn’t do that. You’re looking at it wrong.’ Immediately, we were like, ‘This is gold we’ve struck on,’ because it just matched the theme of the game so well, where the way your actions play out through society are not always in your control and don’t always happen the way you’d expect.”
You can stop Lionel from continuing after just a few crimes, or push him to keep talking until he’s offered up around 20 different examples if you’ve done enough, and there are even more possible crimes than that possible. Faulkner says the team had to raise the number twice, because players kept asking to hear more. It is, apparently, possible to do no crime. At the time of our interview, D’Angelo wouldn’t tell me what happens, but someone has since found out and it’s fantastic.
“Also that Chrono Trigger sequence is in the first act of the game, it’s referencing the events of that festival, right at the start,” Faulkner adds. “But when you put that same moment all the way at the end of a 30-hour game and it can reference everything you did during the entire duration, I think it hits a lot harder.”
The actual ending of Mina the Hollower is kind of a downer. Mina shuts down the generators and defeats Lionel, but the entire island falls into chaos in the aftermath. Mina, blamed for the state of things, is chased out of town and forced into hiding with Thorne. D’Angelo says that Mina the Hollower‘s plot is based on Victorian stories like Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Charles Dickens’ works. In these stories, the overarching themes of the clash between social classes, the horrors of industrialism and capitalism, and the consequences that come with unchecked “progress” don’t mysteriously disappear into a happy ending. So it didn’t make sense to do that with Mina, either. Faulkner wants the player to reflect on what they had been doing, and why.
“We started making a Victorian thing because of what we felt like in Los Angeles,” he says. “It’s just flooded with homeless people and housing prices were enormous. And this is in 2020, now I think the whole world is feeling that. I think Victorian stories really resonate. There’s a reason people are calling it a Second Gilded Age now.
“You know, it’s weird in Zelda that you go and break the pots. Everyone notices that. In this game we wanted to say, you’re doing those things and it means something that you’re doing those things. And…the message at the end resonates with the same idea, that power and capital can control a narrative.”
