I finally beat the funny mouse game, and I gotta say, I’m very mixed. 

The good: Excellent art direction, competent writing, and a very solid base for gameplay. Also: Little Mouse Lass.

The not-so-good: Weird difficulty curve. Brutally unfun at the beginning with how punishing it is, and then hilariously easy at the end. The devs seem deliberately sadistic with some of the choices, including but not limited to; limiting attacks to the cardinal directions, while placing enemies diagonally; making pits deal a full hit of damage, while needing enemies to replenish health, often making it pointless unhealable damage; the burrowing mechanic seems at odds with many of the enemy attack speeds. Once you understand the intention of using it to reposition rather than dodge, it becomes more usable, but it never quite overcomes the long animation, leading to what feels like unavoidable damage; speaking of long animations, the healing animation is far too long. The trinket that halves it is absolutely a crutch, and should have been the base speed from the beginning.

A lot of these issues are mitigated by the trinkets, however they feel like a bandage on self-inflicted issues that should have been caught in play testing.

Overall, I would recommend Mina if you go in with the expectation of it being player unfriendly, but I don’t see it leaving much of a long term impact, certainly not to the level of Shovel Knight.