Mina the Hollower

I went in expecting a polished Shovel Knight follow-up with a gothic coat of paint. What I got was something considerably stranger and more demanding: a top-down action-adventure set on the cursed Tenebrous Isle, where every screen feels like it was designed specifically to kill you, and the tools to push back are genuinely inventive. Yacht Club built the whole visual identity around Game Boy Color hardware constraints, four colors per tile, no 3D assets, and the result is one of the most distinctive-looking pixel games in years. It does not look retro as an apology. It looks retro as a flex. The combat sits at the center of everything. You pick a starting weapon from five options, the Nightstar whip for safe range, the Whisper and Vesper twin daggers for speed, the Blaststrike Maul for heavy commitment, the Guardian Casket for parry-focused players, or the Battery Buster for hybrid ranged builds. Each has a different risk profile and changes how you read boss patterns. Alongside your main weapon you carry one sidearm at a time: throwable axes, the Gyro Dagger, Mist Jar, Volt Hatchet, and around fifteen others. Crucially, you lose your sidearm on death, which gives every fight a small but real stakes bump that keeps you honest. Boss encounters, 28 in total, including nine secret ones, are built around the burrowing mechanic that defines Mina's movement. Going underground dodges most attacks, crosses hazards, and repositions you across the arena faster than walking. Learning when to burrow and when to stay surface-side is the game's core skill loop, and it clicks in a way that feels specific and earned rather than borrowed from its inspirations. The broader structure mixes dungeon-crawl exploration with Souls-adjacent resource tension. Bones are your upgrade currency, spent at Bone Up stations to raise Attack, Defense, and Sidearm Damage up to level 10. Trinket slots expand your passive build options meaningfully, and there is real decision-making in which trinkets to swap after repeated deaths. The game is blunt about its difficulty, but Yacht Club also shipped over 200 accessibility modifiers at launch, so players who want to tune down damage or enemy aggression can do so without a menu buried three levels deep. First playthroughs run roughly 20 to 30 hours, and New Game Plus adds remixed enemy configurations across multiple cycles for players who want the build experimentation space. The one area where reasonable people disagree is the story. It starts with Mina returning to restore six Spark Towers on an island she helped build, straightforward gothic adventure setup, and the main narrative beats are telegraphed early enough that the ending's emotional moments have to work harder to land. Some reviewers felt a few late-game encounters were overengineered in ways that pushed pattern-learning into repetition. These are real criticisms, not dealbreakers, but worth knowing if you prefer games that trust their story as much as their systems. The puzzles, however, draw consistent praise: thoughtful, unhurried, and woven into the same spatial logic as the combat rather than bolted on as palette cleansers. For the audience that wants a tightly authored action game with genuine mechanical depth, a striking visual identity, and the replay hooks to justify multiple runs, this is the clearest recommendation of 2026 so far. If you bounced off Shovel Knight because the difficulty ceiling felt low, this goes somewhere much harder and stranger, and the landing is worth it.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Mina the Hollower.