Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: Bandcamp, Steam
Info
Continuing our critter game posting here because Yacht Club Games’s first non-Shovel Knight game finally came out! Mina the Hollower is a Gothic horror adventure game with a Game Boy Color aesthetic, in contrast to the NES-inspired Shovel Knight series. To flesh out the sound of the Shovel Knight soundtracks, virt used VRC6 expansion channels in addition to the base NES sound, and since the Game Boy is slightly more limited in its sound capabilities than the NES (though it can do a couple of things the NES can’t), it makes sense that he did something similar for Mina too. However, while the Game Boy could theoretically support expansion audio chips inside game carts like the NES could, as far as anyone knows no official cartridges doing so were ever produced, so without any “standard expansion hardware” virt had to make something up: he added Konami’s SCC chip for the MSX into the mix. The SCC provided five wavetable channels and virt made pretty prominent use of them through the soundtrack, so the result feels a bit more like a Konami MSX soundtrack than a Game Boy one.
Mina has way more music than the Shovel Knight games do, almost four hours’ worth; part of it is that it’s just a longer game, and part of it is that development was so long that virt had enough time to actually be able to write all the music he wanted to without having to cut anything. Stylistically a lot of the music went in a fairly obvious Castlevania-chic direction mixing spookiness and romanticness, crossed with virt’s pretty standard love of ’80s R&B/new jack swing in the melodic writing and harmonies; it has a lot of the same vibes of the mainline Shovel Knight soundtracks due to their medieval fantasy stylings, though it’s maybe just a little bit darker and more somber on average. Of course there’s a bunch of prog rock for all the boss themes, plus random stuff here and there like American folk spice thrown in for the Wild West- and Southern swamp-themed areas.
It very much sounds like another “chiptune Yacht Club Games soundtrack,” so it’s solid enough. For the main Shovel Knight soundtracks I generally like the boss themes way more than I do the stage themes, and that’s definitely the case here too, though there are a few area themes with more of an EDM or ambient style or that have a fun amount of whole tonality in them and I like those. I do also definitely appreciate the sound sources here that are less commonly used in modern chiptune soundtracks; the sound programming isn’t necessarily super flashy a lot of the time, but there are a bunch of cool instruments thrown about, and there’s a lot of care taken in the textural work of layering and manipulating them.
Like with the original Shovel Knight, there was a classic chiptune guest composer who contributed two stage themes: Yuzo Koshiro did the music for two lategame areas. You can very easily tell they’re not by virt from the sound programming, less intricate arrangements, and peppier, more old-game melodic approach.
Recommended tracks:
All selections composed by Jake Kaufman (virt).
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“Cinematic – Suspense” has some nice, slightly glitchy sound design
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“Boss – Nether Kraken” is in that classic virt frantic prog style we all know and love
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“Central Ossex” is one of the chiller tracks in the game for the main town theme, a jazzy tango
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“Boss – The Duchess” has one of the simpler, more old school-sounding arrangements in the game; I really like the rhythmically erratic first section
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“Cinematic – Tower Letters” has a really nice EP sound in it
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“Horrific Voyage (Dreadworm’s Maw)” drops the funk
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“Boss – Mined Mind” gets a bit detuned
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“Optical Allusion (Astral Orrery Stellarium)” was the most in-your-face whole-tone-y track
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“Through the Hollow (Cube Mix)” sounds like Streets of Rage 3, which is funny since Yuzo Koshiro worked on this game but didn’t write this piece
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