The halcyon days of a development house being propped up entirely through the popularity and success of its flagship mascot are long gone, yet Yacht Club Games has managed to do it for a little over twelve years thanks to the charismatic and strong back of the spaded squire, Shovel Knight. After seven games and nearly fifty cameos later, however, Yacht Club has arguably toured the azure star around the block more than Nintendo has with its iconic plumber in that amount of time, and has now set its sights on delivering another larger-than-life world to pour its creative juices into—producing a new hero to support the Yacht Club Games’ masthead.
Following an eight-year development run funded by a million-dollar Kickstarter Campaign, Mina the Hollower is Yacht Club Games’ sophomore release, and another retro-inspired experience that’s engineered around the juxtaposition of multiple gameplay conventions. Like Shovel Knight before it, the Zelda-like, Game Boy Color-minded formula is a zesty melting pot of familiar yet fresh tastes that successfully results in Mina the Hollower delivering a signature flavor in its own right. More importantly, it already feels like the kind of follow-up that proves Yacht Club still knows how to build a standout world around a new hero.
Just because Mina the Hollower is an inventive blend of familiar concepts doesn’t mean it’s good, though, right? I mean, that line of thinking has also led to a slew of disasters like Spaghetti Tacos and whatever the hell that Magnum PI/Murder, She Wrote crossover was. Fortunately, not only does Mina the Hollower deliver a fusion that’s on par with Avacado Toast, it may just be the best damn game to have released in 2026 so far.
For as turnkey as Shovel Knight’s action gameplay was, the title features a surprising amount of lore to its world, and the world-building of Mina the Hollower is just as dense, if not more so, thanks in part to the heavy and eerily relatable themes of its story. Enter the island of Tenebrous Isle, a small but dangerous plutocratic nation that’s renowned for the power of its revolutionary Spark Generators. The Duchy has been thrown into disarray as a bloody uprising between Tenebrous Isle’s leader, Baron Lionel, and the former Captain of the Island’s guard, Thorne, and his band of defected rebels cut the energy off to all six ancillary Spark Generators. The conflict soon reaches the fuzzy ears of the Spark Generator’s inventor, and famous member of the Hollower guild, Mina, who is beckoned to Tenebrous Isle at the behest of her old friend, Lionel, and tasked with restoring the island to its former glory, while staving off the threat of Thorne’s rebels 
with her Hollower skills. While the writing is poignant enough to get the point across, the setup and gradual build-up in pacing rarely overstay their welcome, as the narrative plays a more prominent role in the gameplay with a “show over tell” approach that’s not unlike Hidetaka Miyazaki’s direction of Dark Souls lore. Speaking of which—yeah, Mina the Hollower will invoke a swathe of recognizable tropes or concepts that players may have certainly experienced in one game or another not long after its title screen. The difference here, though, is that Yacht Club has toiled away at producing a unique amalgamation of these various nods and winks into being something that’s refreshingly better than it has any right to be.
To start, let’s dive into its presentation and how it contributes diegetically to the overall gameplay of Mina’s adventure. In the same way Shovel Knight wore its reverence for Mega Man on its sleeve, the comparisons between Mina the Hollower and The Legend of Zelda are unavoidable; nonetheless, what separates Mina the Hollower from the Miyamoto opus is the emphasis on its design choice being built solely around the framework of a Game Boy Color game. See, while the land of Hyrule has been translated through multiple iterations since its 8-Bit roots, its interpretation of the world within Nintendo’s early portable hardware has a distinct quality of its own due to the various limitations on what could be presented and done on-screen at any given time. Despite operating on vastly superior tech, Yacht Club Games based the ebb and flow of Mina the Hollower’s level design and traversal around the foundation of a top-down action-adventure game for the second generation of Game Boy. Granted, the obvious concessions to that rule like the widescreen aspect ratio or the amount of sprites on the screen at one time each individual screen set aside, each character, enemy, and object is crafted with the conceit of the best pixel composition to illustrate these same elements in a top-down perspective that authentically resemble other similar experiences from the 90’s Portable like Link’s Awakening DX, Survival Kids, or Bomberman Quest. Using Mina’s character sprite as an example, the rig is constructed with the same 8×8-pixel tile limit across every frame of her character animation and rendered under the same 4-color threshold. This means that everything within that space is Mina’s hurtbox, so something like the conveyance of depth between her and any given hazard or foe is a crucial element that needs to reliably telegraph these liminal spaces at all times, especially for a game that’s brimming with the sort of frenetic action that Mina the Hollower is.
Discounting the various traps and baddies trying to kill you on screen, the adventure also features a LOT of platforming, like a sincerely surprising amount of gaps and hurdles to hop or vault over, and to that same surprising degree—Yacht Club Games’ deep understanding of the top-down perspective and the importance of telegraphing those said liminal spaces wore even more effectively for its platforming design. If anyone is familiar with Roc’s Feather item from Zelda, then the mechanic will take no time to click with you. What makes the action flow so well, however, is the added depth Yacht Club Games seemingly brought to it, which, honestly, hasn’t been explored as deeply among those aforementioned contemporary titles. Much of this is achieved through the immaculate lighting of Mina’s shadow and its dynamic shifts in size and position relative to the mouse’s trajectory from liftoff, alongside the deliberate staging of chasms of varying sizes relative to their platforms. The presentation is, of course, neatly tied up with the musical talent of Jake Kauffman, and while there are some banger tracks in the game’s musical composition, the overall tracklist isn’t as particularly memorable as his work was with Shovel Knight. I know I’ve been a little pickier with soundtracks for the games I’ve reviewed this past year, but I came into this release with some especially high expectations, and I’m a little surprised that I came away with mild contentment instead of excitable clamor to throw the game’s tunes onto my playlist rotation. Despite my lackadaisical enthusiasm for the composition, the soundtrack still oozes with the feeling of authenticity Mina the Hollower shows towards emulating the feel of a Game Boy Color game, with the composition utilizing the exact sound font of the Game Boy Color’s sound chip technology, and it’s definitely catchy enough to keep the volume up any chance you can.
Above all else, though, the mad lads didn’t just nail the execution of this foundation and the deceptive degree of jumping they threw in—they reinvigorated it altogether with an entirely new game-changing layer to the overhead four-way chaos, and it’s all thanks to the namesake of Mina’s trademark ability, “Hollowing.”
At any point a player sends Mina into the air, they can send her diving directly into the soil to temporarily burrow a tunneled path underground to maneuver around obstacles, tactically evade enemies, or even provide some extra airtime from Mina explosively erupting out of the ground from every dig you bore through the floor. This mechanic is crucial not only for navigating many of the perils and secrets of Tenebrous Isle, but also for staying alive during some of the more hectic mob encounters players will constantly find themselves surrounded by.
Throughout the various routes and biomes of the island, players will spot smaller gaps, nooks, or crannies that aren’t normally accessible to pass under on foot, but are structured in a way where they seemingly are accessible under the surface of the area for anyone adept at digging. Instilling the same sensation Portal had, having players “think with portals,” the hollowing element to the game’s stage design doesn’t take long to ingrain the exercise of subconsciously scanning for these points of interest across every screen you scroll through. The complexity doesn’t just stop at simply playing “limbo” with obstacles on screen either; there are numerous ways that tunneling in the world of Tenebrous will affect the landscape in a way that will allow you to progress. Many of these scenarios can range from tunneling away surface rock that’s blocking the flow of molten lava and then directing said river of magma towards specific flammable obstacles without burning yourself to death, or navigating long stretches of water by diving under the waves to reach the water bottom below, and then subsequently timing your breach back to the surface on a lock of land to avoid falling back into the water and drowning. Normally, moving around a large top-down world like this can easily turn into a slog the deeper you explore, but Mina the Hollower’s hollowing mechanic quickly alleviates that tedium by giving players a speedy means of travel that also offers a load of practicality to its frequent use.
The added incentive will really play into the engagement of pathfinding for Mina’s gothic outing because navigating Tenebrous Isle is nearly non-linear throughway of progression, with no clear waypoint, mini-map, or beaten path to speak of—you will instinctively tunnel against anything and everything that looks remotely different out of sheer necessity. As daunting as this cryptic approach may be, especially when other retro-like titles, both old and new, have shown it doesn’t have the best record of successfully applying freeform pathfinding in a world filled with nonlinear locks, the immaculate level design of Mina the Hollower, and excellent ability to telegraph points of interest comes in clutch to really make the overall experience of traversal and exploration an enjoyable one.
The other big aspect of Mina the Hollower that draws its own inevitable comparison is the combat, and as polished as many of the core mechanics are in the game, this is easily the roughest element of the title’s overall experience.
While the foundation of its combat is essentially the same fundamentals of the Game Boy Legend of Zelda titles, there are still several other nuances that layer on top of that core setup that give Mina the Hollower’s combat its own identity, for better and for worse. At the start of the game, players will have the opportunity to choose between three primary weapons to equip for the majority of the early game, and much like a certain decision you’re given in a laboratory at the edge of Pallet Town, each weapon will present various pros and cons that exemplify the imbalances of Mina’s combat.
The trademark weapon of the three (assumed solely from the frequency of its presence in the game’s promotional materials over the other weaponry) is the Nightstar chain whip, an arsenal that can give Mina the edge in closing the gap with her attacks against different enemies while still maintaining a safer distance from any counterattacks, at the cost of having a more subdued attack strength. Personally, this was my primary weapon of choice, as it not only made a lot of the more difficult skirmishes a bit easier, but the execution of its attacks is reminiscent of the same whip mechanics for certain Vampire Killer series made by Konami, and it was the one I think will feel the most natural for players to use within the overall setup of Mina the Hollower. The second weapon is the pair of daggers, Whisper and Vesper, the quickest of the three. They can rapidly attack a foe into oblivion before they even have a chance to respond, with the drawback of needing to get up close and personal to do the job thanks to its poor reach, leaving you vulnerable to beefier 
foes who can take the hits and fire back hard. The last weapon is the Blaststrike Maul, a giant-ass hammer that Mina can wield for powerful two-handed strikes, and can also be charged for an extra-powerful slam with an area-of-effect strike, but it’s slow as all hell and can leave you wide open for a lethal assault. One neat thing about the hammer is that, while charging an attack, players can access an evasive roll maneuver very similar to Dark Souls, without any of the stamina management crap attached to it. It still takes some practice to pull off effectively, though, as the window of invulnerability is far more precise, but it’s definitely a close-second favorite for the amount of damage it can output with the right amount of skill invested. Players won’t be locked to one primary weapon for too long if they explore in just the right places, and will soon be able to unlock the other two for use as quickly as the early onset of the game if they poke around in the right areas. Going back to Castlevania, players will also have access to sub-weapons they can use for secondary attacks or support, like a spinning dagger that can boomerang through multiple enemies when thrown just right, or a mist jar that can give Mina the power to phase through enemies like she's Kitty Pryde, with the added bonus of siphoning off some health from them in the process. Finding the right tools for the given challenge of the assorted monsters and rebels you’ll fight against does a lot to change up the otherwise simple combat mechanics while also giving you a needed edge—especially when it comes to the biggest drawback to the game’s combat mechanics.
With the exception of the Hammer’s AOE attack, Mina can only attack enemies in any of the four directions she is directly facing, while enemies have the advantage of being able to lob eight-way offenses that make defending exceptionally more difficult. As far as why Yacht Club games went in this direction—who knows, because after spending as much time as I have with the title, it’s highly unlikely that implementing the ability to perform an eight-way offensive capability to the dirt-trenched rodent will do anything to affect the game’s balance in a negative way. The limitation honestly feels like a punitive means of inflating the difficulty, and that’s what leads me to the only other issue I have with Mina the Hollower’s overall gameplay; in spite of its polished design, this grievance, along with a slew of others, can quickly shift the difficulty curve of the game into unfair territory.
Hearkening back to the Dark Souls comparison (and a certain Tim Robbins bit), in order to effectively deal with the steadily growing threat of the enemies and hazards around you, every enemy death will reward players with currency of “bones” that they can use to enhance their Attack, Defense, and the effectiveness of their sub-weapons. Completing different quests, whether they’re minor or major, will also net you some prime marrow for your bank, and will be another vital means of building yourself because, like the torturous action game by FromSoftware, dying in Mina the Hollower will cause the heroic mysh’ to drop her entire stash of bones. Now, the big difference between losing it all in Lordran and losing it all in Tenebrous Isle is that should you so happen to have met your end a second time without retrieving your precious bones, so long as you have a spark under your spark counter, you’ll get another chance just like the first time around, and essentially act like lives. The quest itself isn’t entirely a gauntlet of pain, as players will also get their obligatory “bonfire checkpoints with Mina’s Underlab, an underground safehouse where players will be able to adjust their various loadouts and manage their resources, and vials, the consumable that will replenish her health back much like that of the “Estus flask” in Dark Souls. It does bear mentioning, though, that the health recovery mechanic is another wrinkle of artificial difficulty in and of itself because of the needless complexity behind the game’s “plasma” system. See, unlike your traditional health bars you’d see in most action-adventure affairs where health recovery is as simple as consuming the recovery item to generate health back up to a certain point, Mina the Hollower opts for a more convoluted approach that can best be compared to the dynamics of health recovery in a friggin’ tag-team fighter. Anytime Mina takes damage, she’ll not only lose her primary health, the metric that dictates how close to death she is, she’ll also lose a bit of plasma from the plasma meter, and the purpose of this meter is to measure out how much health Mina can replenish when using a recovery item, meaning that even if the recovery item is capable of topping her back up to full health, it’ll still be capped at whatever metric the plasma meter is currently topped at. The result is that players will not only have to micromanage the status of two separate metrics for maintaining their health; they’ll need to vigilantly watch for the most opportune times to consume a recovery item instead of waiting until they’re at low health, because they’ll likely also be at low plasma too—rendering health recovery into a pointless exercise.
Getting back to the Spark system, the mechanic is still a great method to balance out the road to mastery without the journey feeling too punishing in the process, and somewhat hearkens back to the risk/reward system Shovel Knight had in place for its treasure gathering, and the importance that played in beefing up the metal man and his gardening tool. The one drawback to the Spark system, though, is that, like Dark Souls, the Spark can possess the enemy who did you in or anyone in the vicinity, and will need to be taken out in order for you to earn back that precious spark. The Sparks aren’t just precious lives to bank either—many of the routes, be they critical or secret, will often charge players a Spark toll that will require Mina to pay any number of Sparks in exchange for entry past the door, adding a new layer where players will need to survive with enough sparks to pay the price for passage, and then doubly so as they’ll no longer have the safety net of those same extra lives after the fact.
Another big help that can quickly turn the tide of battle is the added effects of trinkets, the support items players can equip to grant Mina a whole wave of abilities or enhancements to her fundamental skills. There are sixty different trinkets players can earn and badge onto themselves, and each one yields a wild variety of effects, such a dynamic ability to summon fly that will orbit Mina like buggy satellites and stack extra damage onto any enemy they make contact with, or the ability to continuously dive back underground immediately after surfacing without the need to touch solid ground first, or even a “second-chance” revival that gives you a little more wiggle room to live on before reaching a checkpoint or recovering your bones.
Now, mind you, this is the CORE of the game and its system at work, and yeah, while it all sounds super intimidating, Yacht Club Games came to the table prepared, and loaded the game with a bunch of built-in modifiers that can work in lowering the difficulty or spiking it up even higher in challenge! Do you want to know what it would be like if Mina had an infinite jump and could air dance her way across the level like a shōnen anime protagonist? You can do that! Do you want to make it to where all enemies die from a single attack? You can do that too! Hell, you can even randomize the location and appearance of every trinket, character upgrade, and quest item, all without the headache of patching your game file with a download from romhacking.net! There are over a whopping 250 modifiers you can play around with the moment you boot up the game, and the added possibilities of being able to tone down the punishment for your pace or getting the chance to revisit the experience under these new parameters are simply countless. Activating any of these modifers will void out all eligible Achievements/Trophies for the playthrough of that specific save file, and any completion of the game with them turned on will also mark the progress bar of that file with a scarlet letter of sorts to show that you did some foolin’ to score the progress listed on its status bar, but the game does have three save files to play with so who’s to say you can’t have your cake and eat it too yeah?
For all of the title’s shortcomings, the enigmatic charm and pervasively effective drive to push players onward through its ornate world is truly a gestalt of an experience that stands above the sum of its parts—Mina the Hollower is absolutely a must-play experience, and that doesn’t just stand for 2026; that’s sentiment that stands for this generation in general. I can’t stress this enough—Yacht Club Games really hit out of the park with this one, with another larger-than-life character that symbolizes everything that makes Video Games so damn cool still. Get Mina the Hollower or just go to hell!