Konjak aka Joakim Sandberg has worked as an animator on many great games at WayForward, but has also created a few successful solo projects. Let’s look at one of his earliest works first.

Technically I have played one of Konjak’s games before: Legend of Princess, which I played through on a stream. He’s clearly made a lot of progress in the four or five years between the two; while this early effort shows promise, it’s quite clunky. It’s full of bugs, controls awkwardly, and the character design and animation hasn’t quite progressed to the standards Sandberg would become known for later.

I’m sure he knows all of this, as the release of the game available on his website is quite open about its unfinished nature, with a splash screen at startup warning as such and saying that after abandoning the project he now hates it! It also says that in its available state it represents about half of what the game was intended as; judging by certian UI elements it seems a bit more than that. But it’s perfectly playable (besides a few random bugs that caused softlocks), it’s just that the content just stops at a certain point: about four and a half hours for me, more if you’re diligent about backtracking for upgrades.

Anyway, it’s a sidescrolling action game. Mina is a pirate who’s washed up somewhere and gets caught up in a quest for magic stones, interacting with mysterious personages and wacky townsfolk… all a bit cliche really. She has a basic knife attack, and you’ll unlock the ability to place bombs and hookshot to targets (only useful for exploration), and throw different kinds of fruit (for puzzles/interaction and some combat utility). The world is contiguous and areas are slightly non-linear, so you’ll be retreading the same ground a fair bit to find alternate paths or a switch to allow progress.

There’s a nice range of enemy designs, from lobster men to phantom coats to morphogenic oil blobs, but the real focus of the game is on the boss fights. These are huge, bombastic encounters, where usually you dodge their several attack patterns until you happen upon the one that reveals a weakness, allowing one hit at a time. One or two nearer the end of the game are a bit more open to attacks throughout, which I preferred, but all were enjoyable to learn.

Judging it as an amateur effort that was abandoned, it holds up rather well. There were times when a punishing section, a sudden boss fight, or—heaven forbid—a glitch caused me to lose a fair amount of progress, so I would’ve appreciated more frequent opportunities to save… bah, what a baby I am! Either way, I had a decent time with Mina, as it has some good ideas buried under its very rough exterior. I look forward to following Sandberg’s future works!