What Hollowing is
Hollowing is the mechanic the game is named after. Hold the action button to dive underground, and while you are burrowed Mina is invincible — she passes beneath enemies, hazards and certain physical obstacles. There is no stamina bar and no resource cost, so this is your bread-and-butter defensive move.
Mina is otherwise a deliberately limited fighter: she can only move and attack in four directions (no diagonals), and she attacks slower than many enemies. Hollowing is what balances that out. Rather than a parry button on every weapon, the game leans on “burrowing over parrying” as its default evasion identity.
What you can do with it
- Dodge attacks, including many boss patterns, by slipping underground at the right moment.
- Reposition mid-combat — pop up behind an enemy that just swung at empty air.
- Cross gaps and bottomless pits, and slip under physical obstacles.
- Chain a burrow directly into an attack for a surprise hit.
- Burrow jump: re-emerge for a higher, farther leap (about two tiles), reaching platforms a normal jump can’t.
- Walk on water: activate the burrow before your feet touch water — sprint, jump toward it, and hold the action button as you land. Abusable from the start.
Limitations
You cannot burrow through lava (and some other hazards), so a few rooms force you to solve the problem a different way. Burrow time is finite, but the Iron Lung trinket extends it (even underwater) and the Tunneling Codex lets you burrow repeatedly or dive without surfacing. The Wallower’s Gauntlets trinket even lets you burrow into walls.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Input | Hold the action button to dive underground |
| Invincibility | Yes — invincible while underground |
| Resource cost | None (no stamina bar) |
| Cannot pass through | Lava and some hazards |
