Justin Roiland, Shovel Knight devs dish on their trippy new indie games

SEATTLE—Last week's crowded, fun-filled PAX West 2022 expo was very different from the ghost town of its 2021 edition, which meant Ars Technica got to spend time with some of our favorite video game creators. You may have already seen our PAX West chat with the co-creators of the Monkey Island series, where we got a peek at Return to Monkey Island's new puzzles, jokes, and delectable animations. But that wasn't the only interview we conducted.

Below are two additional interviews based on highlights from our time at the four-day expo. Each comes from indie studios whose previous games have impressed: Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight) and Squanch Games (Trover Saves the Universe). The interviews were conducted after I played each studio's new game, and I'll be back tomorrow to report on other gameplay highlights from the expo.

Mina the Hollower
(Release date TBD, platforms TBD | Official site)

The deeper you go into Mina the Hollower, the more gothic and Castlevania-ey its Zelda-inspired top-down adventuring looks and feels.

Yacht Club Games

The deeper you go into Mina the Hollower, the more gothic and Castlevania-ey its Zelda-inspired top-down adventuring looks and feels. Yacht Club Games

This dialogue helps reinforce the idea that the game's titular hero, Mina, is indeed a "hollower."

This dialogue helps reinforce the idea that the game's titular hero, Mina, is indeed a "hollower."

Unlike in most video games, the water level in Mina the Hollower actually looks cool.

Unlike in most video games, the water level in Mina the Hollower actually looks cool.

This dialogue helps reinforce the idea that the game's titular hero, Mina, is indeed a "hollower."

Unlike in most video games, the water level in Mina the Hollower actually looks cool.

You can equip a few, but not all, of Mina's trinkets to add nifty perks to your default abilities. Being able to explode out of a burrow sounds pretty sick, based on what we've already played.

Mina, seen here having a... bone to pick with someone.

My favorite discovery at PAX West 2022 wasn't entirely surprising, as it hit many of my personal gameplay biases: a Game Boy Color aesthetic; a top-down adventure that recalls the three Game Boy-exclusive Legend of Zelda games; and the development chops of a studio like Yacht Club Games, which is best known as the creator of the incredible platformer Shovel Knight.

Still, Mina the Hollower's world gameplay premiere at PAX West included an element I wasn't suspecting: a healthy dose of NES-era Castlevania. As a result, Yacht Club's design philosophies veer from Link's Awakening to make this new game more of an action-first exploration game and less of a backtrack-heavy, "seek action" adventure.

The basic concept sounds pretty Zelda-like: Start from a central "hub" as a lowly, average adventurer (in this case, a timid mouse named Mina), then explore roughly eight zones in 2D, top-down fashion; each contains "overworld" and "dungeon" elements. Beat all of these levels to face a final challenge while getting stronger as you play.

But Mina the Hollower eschews the idea of an inventory that lets the hero solve puzzles and explore new zones along the way. Instead, progress is more like that in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, where players pick which basic meters (damage, health, armor, etc.) to expand as they rack up experience points. (Also, as in Zelda II, each time you upgrade a meter, its next upgrade is more expensive, which may delay your progress if you want to go all-in on, say, attack power.)

Equipping items, meanwhile, works as it does in classic Castlevania games: find the secondary weapon you want by smashing pots or lanterns, then keep it equipped until you stumble upon the next one you might want to use. (If you accidentally pick up a weapon you don't want, you get a generous amount of time to grab the last one you'd equipped.)

These weapon options shamelessly lift from the Castlevania series and include exploding bottles, tossable axes (which rise and fall in an arc), and throwing daggers, along with the more Zelda-like ability to dash into and tackle baddies. As in Castlevania, their ammo count is based on a mana meter that must be restored through exploration and killing enemies. The game's primary weapon is a whip as well, and Mina has a slight delay when she flicks her little mouse wrist back before lunging forward and striking.

Mina's signature maneuver is a burrow, which lets her sneak beneath the earth, move a bit faster, and pop up for an extra-long jump. And this maneuver is certainly the game's secret feel-good sauce. In combat, it lets Mina craftily dodge enemies and traps, while she can also burrow during overworld exploration to root out treasure, dig beneath and lift larger stones, or sneak into hidden rooms.

Mina also gets a jump move by default (no item needed), which means the level design generally forces Mina to hop around in both battle and puzzle solving. After only minutes of play, I figured out a higher-speed maneuver, which required burrowing to hop and jumping diagonally over gaps or up stairs. I didn't need long to appreciate the new game's combat timings, and I quickly discovered how to manipulate or deceive several tricky baddies to attack them before they could wear down my limited health.

"That's been a secret for the past 5–6 years: our unannounced 3D game."

Mina the Hollower's director, Alec Faulkner, confirmed in an interview with Ars Technica that he began working on a Mina-style prototype in early 2019 while Yacht Club was putting final touches on the Shovel Knight: King of Hearts expansion pack. He'd been inspired by a recent retro-tech project.

"I bought a new Game Boy Color, hacked it, added a backlit screen, and was playing games on a Flash cart all the time," he said. "I was thinking, 'These Zelda games sure are cool, but why are there no other 2D Zeldas?' Nintendo ain't making a new 2D Zelda nowadays, and no one else tried [during that era]. That's so bizarre to me: there's a billion platform games that try to be Mario."

Faulkner said that the game began life with a more limited development scope: "Just five levels, and we could be done in less than a year, wouldn't that be nice?" he said. The game ballooned into a larger project, which still doesn't have a release date or announced target platforms, but Faulkner suggested that Yacht Club, coming off the success of Shovel Knight, is uniquely placed to make such a game. "We need to make this game," Faulkner said. "No one else is gonna. Art, game design, level design—everything needed to make a full-fledged adventure that's just a single-player thing, feature-complete upon launch? Nobody else does that anymore."

He estimated that the final game will have the length and breadth of Shovel Knight ("five to eight hours for most people"), though based on what I played at PAX West, that runtime will include unapologetically tough combat, a Bloodborne-style risk-and-reward system, and inventively designed 2D worlds that encourage exploration. (In other words, Mina will consist of a dense five to eight hours.) Additionally, Faulkner was happy to spoil a big company secret.

When I pointed to the current demo's use of parallax scrolling to portray depth in both backgrounds and holes in the overworld, Faulkner admitted that this game's code wouldn't run on original Game Boy Color hardware. "Under the hood, there's way more in common with Breath of the Wild than Link's Awakening," he said. "This engine is actually brand new, made from scratch by our team. That's been our secret for the past five or six years—it's being used to develop both this game and concurrently our unannounced 3D game."

Alec, I believe that's an announcement. Yacht Club Games had no further details to offer about its no-longer-secret project, nor how the famously 2D-focused studio will shift to the world of 3D game development.

High on Life
(December 13, 2022, Windows, Xbox Series X/S, XB1 | Official site)

Walk through a crowded alien town while your gun, uh, talks to you in High on Life.

Squanch Games

Walk through a crowded alien town while your gun, uh, talks to you in High on Life. Squanch Games

I've yet to see how this different-looking gun acts or talks in the game.

I've yet to see how this different-looking gun acts or talks in the game.

"So, uh, technically, my face is on my butt, right?"

"So, uh, technically, my face is on my butt, right?"

I've yet to see how this different-looking gun acts or talks in the game.

"So, uh, technically, my face is on my butt, right?"

"Did you watch the full 25-minute thing?" asked Squanch Games Creative Director Justin Roiland, perhaps best known as the co-creator and lead voice actor of Adult Swim's Rick & Morty. He immediately wanted to know how much of his new video game, High on Life, I'd seen before we began chatting.

He was all stutters and mumbles on the first morning of PAX West 2022 as he attempted to orchestrate a solid presentation of his company's ambitious first-person shooter (including a last-minute installation of a monitor with faster input response times) while also managing his obvious excitement about the project. In trying to answer a question about the game's bigger picture, Roiland began stumbling over his words, so much so that it's impossible for me to transcribe a legible introduction. It's when he took a deep breath and focused on something cool that he got his bearings: "I'm never good at knowing when I can talk about certain stuff," Roiland said while sitting on a hotel bed. "OK, so, fuck it. I'll just talk about it."

He immediately skipped past all the basic bullet points—High on Life is a first-person action game set in an alien world in which your weapons talk directly to you—and described an admittedly trippy feature for his new open-world game. Though the game includes several planets that players can visit and explore freely, each with different biomes and missions, High on Life will sometimes warp content directly to the player. "What I found really exciting and fascinating was, well, we don't need this big, giant map because we can warp in these fun encounters," Roiland said.

He described his love of a good Far Cry encounter, in which players stumble upon bases and other protected buildings, then sleuth out how to get past their defenses. "But once you do it, that building is like, 'OK, been there, done that on the map,'" Roiland said. "That's why [Ubisoft] needs their massive map, because you're repeating that loop. How fucking cool is it in our game that we can just warp in a place? Let's be clear: You as the character are not warping. We are taking that land mass and warping it to you."

This gameplay image from High on Life is not directly taken from the sequence I played, but it resembles the kind of straightforward, colorful gunplay I experienced.

Sadly, High on Life's PAX West demo didn't include any such wild content warping. I still had fun playing it, though, after Roiland paused mid-chat to hand me a gamepad. This portion of the game, set early in its "8–12 hour campaign," equips players with a single talking pistol, whose eyes and mouth are on the back of the gun so that they look directly at players while offering reluctant quips and advice. (Unsurprisingly, this character sounds like and resembles Morty of Rick and Morty.) The demo's primary mission, which takes a "wide linear" path à la God of War 2018, is to find a knife—which has its own face, voice, and personality—and use it to kill a boss. The catch is that this knife is psychotic and begs you to stab anything and everything, including yourself.

"Trover was such a good primer for leveling way the f*** up for what we're doing with narrative here."

I laughed quite a bit during this demo, though I'm partial to the absurdist humor in Roiland-produced fare like Rick & Morty, Accounting, and Trover Saves the Universe. The gameplay I've seen so far is more of a vehicle to deliver fourth-wall-breaking moments of humor and personality as opposed to a reinvention of the first-person adventure genre, and Roiland suggested that his new game's emphasis on exploration and backtracking will land somewhere between Metroid Prime and Bioshock—which is to say, atmosphere and story are a higher priority than innovative, twitchy combat.

But let's not call the action here simple or pedestrian. In particular, I appreciated the abilities I equipped by the end of the demo. These included a rechargeable goo grenade that launches foes into the air so they can be juggled with pistol fire and a handy grappling hook that figures nicely in the demo's final battle, which makes players swing above a pool of lava while shooting at the boss below.

Roiland admitted that this new game's talking, personality-filled guns were actually in Squanch's first pitch to get funding from Sony for Trover, only for that game to be scaled back in favor of a third-person platforming adventure. Even so, Roiland and the team at Squanch emphasized their dream of having in-game characters talk to players.