Despite its gothic horror setting, I wouldn’t call Mina the Hollower a scary game. It has its eerie moments and some fierce monsters, but it’s as whimsical as any Zelda game. That said, I do have a warning to anyone who is easily spooked by jump scares: Never, under any circumstances, talk to Klumpy.
Klumpy is a clown who lives in Ossex, the central town on Tenebrous Isle. He’s some sort of critter in a mascot costume; you can see his dastardly eyes poking out of the clown’s mouth. You can find him hanging out northeast of the fountain at the center of town. At a glance, he just looks like any other unassuming NPC there to say his one canned line. This is a ruse. Klumpy is a jump-scare machine that will haunt your entire playthrough if you agree to his devil’s bargain.
When you first speak to Klumpy, he’ll ask if you’d like to hear his jokes. If you say yes, you’re signing up for him to appear throughout the rest of the game to tell you jokes. “If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not laughing hard enough,” he says. “I’ll have you laughing all over the Isles soon — just you wait!” This is a threat, and you should treat it as such.
The deal is that Klumpy will jump out at you during several unexpected moments, and he will scare the shit out of you in the process. Just cutting some grass in Mourner’s Mile? Klumpy is going to launch out of the ground and hit you with some gallows humor. He’s always making jokes about murder and executions, too, which makes his presence all the more unsettling.
The fiends at Yacht Club Games have a blast putting Klumpy in places where you’re not expecting him, and his appearances are spaced out far enough apart that you’ll forget he’s there by the time he pops up again. You might be taking down an enemy in battle when Klumpy hops out of the bastard’s corpse to hit you with his latest joke. Klumpy has no chill, and you won’t either after the devil frays your nerves.
As much as I would beat Klumpy to a pulp if he ever pulled that on me in real life, I do have a soft spot for the freak. He’s just one small example of something I love about Mina the Hollower: its NPCs. Every character you meet has a ton of personality, even if they only spout a one-liner that gives color to the world. You can learn a lot about the inner politics of Ossex if you chat with its residents about the state of the city’s newspaper or its western slum. Yacht Club Games put so much detail into its adventure, and you can really feel that even in the littlest conversations.
So go ahead: Talk to everyone you see! Just be wary of Klumpy if you’re trying to keep your heart rate down in an already high-stress game. He’ll make Resident Evil Requiem look like a walk in the park.
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