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Mina the Hollower
game
•8/2/2026

Mina the Hollower

byYacht Club Games
SteamNintendo Switch
8.9
The Verdict
"Mina the Hollower is the sound of a studio refusing to coast, and that alone would be worth noting. That it's also excellent is the good news." "The burrow is a legitimately smart piece of design — a single mechanic that restructures how you think about defense, movement, and discovery simultaneously, which is a harder trick than any amount of visual polish. The art direction treats a technical constraint as a creative discipline rather than a costume. Kaufman's score understands it's scoring horror, not heroics. The accessibility work is the model other studios should be copying." "The flaws are real and worth naming plainly. A handful of bosses spike hard enough to send you grinding, which is the wrong verb for a game this hand-crafted. The tutorialization is genuinely too thin, and some players will finish without understanding systems the game spent development time building. Neither is fatal. Both are the difference between very good and untouchable." "The critical consensus — 90 on Metacritic, 98% recommending on OpenCritic, 89% positive from 5,300+ players — is well-calibrated. This is a very good game with a sharp edge, sold at a price that makes the sharp edge easy to forgive. Yacht Club bet that its audience would follow it somewhere darker and harder than Shovel Knight. The bet paid." "Buy it. Turn on the accessibility modifiers if you need them. And read the Trinket descriptions, because nobody else is going to tell you what they do."

Gallery

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Key Features

The Nightstar Whip: Mina's primary weapon is a whip with real windup and real commitment. It's not a sword you mash. Attacks have wind-up frames, directional reach, and recovery — a deliberate, spacing-first combat model that rewards positioning over aggression.
The Burrow: The signature verb. Mina tunnels underground to pass beneath hazards, slip out of attack patterns, cross gaps, and surface inside secret rooms. It's simultaneously the dodge button, the traversal tool, and the exploration key — one input carrying three jobs, and carrying them well.
Sidearms & Trinkets: Collectible secondary weapons paired with equippable modifiers that reshape your build. Trinkets aren't stat trinkets in the boring sense; they alter how systems behave, which turns loadout selection into a genuine pre-fight strategic decision rather than a menu tax.
Interconnected, Secret-Dense Levels: Not an open world. A hub-and-spoke web of dense, hand-authored spaces with shortcuts, hidden rooms, and vertical layering that reward mapping the place in your head.
Accessibility Modifiers: A deep suite of tuning options — enemy damage, traversal assistance, and more — that function as a difficulty dial rather than a difficulty setting.
Jake Kaufman's Chiptune Score: The Shovel Knight composer working in a Gothic register. Restrained where you'd expect bombast.

The Good

The burrow mechanic collapses dodging, traversal, and exploration into one verb — genuinely fresh design
Art direction executes the GBC constraint as craft, with modern animation counts and superb readability
Jake Kaufman's restrained Gothic chiptune score — atmosphere over hooks
Trinkets and Sidearms make loadout a pre-fight strategy decision, not a stat menu
$19.99 for a dense, hand-authored, secret-rich campaign is aggressive value
Accessibility modifiers as a mixing board, not three preset tiers

The Bad

Difficulty spikes, not curves; several bosses jump from fair to punishing with no warning
Backtracking to grind upgrades is a real failure state the encounter design routes you into
Thin tutorialization; key mechanics unexplained or buried in menus
Whip combat's commitment model will alienate players who want fluid, forgiving action
Widescreen presentation slightly undercuts the hardware-authenticity claim
No New Game+ or post-campaign structure discussed at launch

In-Depth Review

Bottom Line: Yacht Club Games spent seven years proving it could do something other than Shovel Knight, and the answer is a gorgeous, mean, mechanically inventive Game Boy Color fever dream that occasionally forgets to teach you its own rules. At $19.99, it's one of the easiest recommendations of 2026 — provided you're willing to meet it halfway on difficulty.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is a three-beat rhythm: explore, die, adapt. You enter a region, get carved up by something new, retreat, re-spec your Trinkets and Sidearm, and go back in with a plan. It's Souls-shaped without being a Souls clone — there's no stamina meter, no equip load, no obtuse item descriptions. What it borrows is the philosophy: enemies are puzzles with damage values attached, and your first fifteen attempts are research.

The burrow is what makes this feel like Yacht Club and not a tribute act. Most action games separate the dodge from the traverse from the secret-finding. Here they're one button, which means every defensive decision is also a positional decision and potentially an exploration decision. You dive under a boss's sweep, and because you're already underground, you might as well check whether that suspicious corner tile hides a room. The mechanic collapses three verbs into one, and that compression is where the game earns its identity. It's the rare case where a single traversal ability restructures how you think about every screen.

The whip is the other half of that equation, and it's a harder sell. Whip combat is inherently commitment combat — you're locked into a swing arc and a recovery window, which means every attack is a small bet. Get greedy and you eat a hit you saw coming from four frames away. This is the correct design decision, and it is also the thing that will make some players put the controller down. There is no forgiving version of a whip. The weapon is the difficulty curve.

Where the Difficulty Breaks

Here's the honest critique, and it's the one that shows up consistently across both critic reviews and player sentiment: the difficulty curve isn't a curve, it's a staircase with a few missing steps.

Boss encounters are the elaborate, multi-phase, pattern-dense set pieces the studio has always been good at — and most of them are exemplary. But several land as spikes rather than escalations. You'll clear a region feeling competent, walk into a boss room, and discover that the game has quietly assumed you spent time you didn't spend leveling or hunting Trinkets. The remedy is backtracking to grind upgrades, and grinding is precisely the failure state a game this tightly authored should never route you into. When a player's optimal response to a wall is "go farm," the encounter design has stopped teaching and started gatekeeping.

To be clear about proportion: this is a flaw in a few fights, not a systemic collapse. But it's the difference between a 9 and a 10, and it's the reason those 11% of negative Steam reviews exist.

Onboarding Friction

The second problem is smaller and more annoying because it's so fixable. Tutorialization is thin to the point of negligence. Mechanics that materially affect your survival are either unexplained or buried in menus you have no reason to open. The Trinket system in particular deserves better surfacing — it's the deepest expression layer in the game, and a meaningful number of players will finish a third of it without understanding what they're building.

There's a school of thought that says obscurity breeds discovery, and in a game explicitly evoking the cartridge era, some of that is intentional texture. I don't buy it here. There's a difference between hiding a secret and failing to explain the controls. The first is design. The second is onboarding friction dressed up as authenticity.

The Redemption Layer

The accessibility modifiers are what keep this from being a genuine problem. Yacht Club has shipped a granular set of tuning options — enemy damage scaling, traversal assists, and more — that let you file down the spikes without switching to a patronizing "Easy Mode" that gates content or scolds you in the pause menu. This is how difficulty options should work in 2026: not three preset tiers, but a mixing board. A player who loves the exploration and hates the boss rush can have exactly the game they want. That's not a concession. That's respect for the audience, and it materially widens who this game is for.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.

From Sawdust Journey

Finished reading? Go make something.

Full builds from rough lumber to final finish, with the measurements and the missteps.