As Yacht Club Games' first new IP in over a decade, Mina the Hollower is an outright marvel, meaningfully distinct from Shovel Knight and a perfectly pixelated adventure that proudly stands alongside it. A love letter to the Game Boy Color in general and Link's Awakening in particular, Mina the Hollower's campaign captivated every last ounce of my attention, and its inspired approach to post-game content pushes it over the top.
Sure, a Shovel Knight sequel or spin-off could have been a safer play than Mina, but digging does remain as a primary mechanic and thematic hook, linking together a slew of other traversal abilities. Don't let its classic top-down Zelda POV and retro-styled pixels fool you, as Mina the Hollower is quick to reveal its depth, delivering one of the year's standout action-adventure indie milestones.
The New Burrower in Town
Mina Controls and Burrows Like A Dream
You are Mina, heroic inventor mouse on a seafaring journey to Tenebrous Isle. As a guild member of the "Hollowers," Mina and the island share a meaningful past, her handiwork evident in its massive Spark Towers, now dim in the nighttime skyline. Her boat is suddenly wrecked by a tentacled monstrosity, and Mina is left to contend with the monsters guarding the route to the central city of Ossex.
Reaching the capital functions as a tutorial and initiation to the game's agile platforming and combat. Mina is a spry hero ready to rumble right off the bat; you initially choose one weapon of an eventual set of five, any of which can be used on the ground or in the air, along with a burgeoning rotation of funky sidearms.
Most importantly, Mina can burrow directly into the floor anytime, a la Bugs Bunny, zooming through the soil before popping out in an energetic leap. Burrowing typically lasts just a second or two at most, but it is a crucial part of the game's action and puzzle-platforming shenanigans, as are its resultant long jumps. Like virtually every other interaction in Mina the Hollower, burrowing is precise to the touch and polished to a gleam.
Everything Clicks Together Beautifully in Mina the Hollower
So Much To Explore and So Many Systems to Combine
Perhaps even more so than Shovel Knight before it, Mina the Hollower feels holistically designed right down to the screws. Its open-world structure is indeed beautifully open, with few of the island's 16 varied biomes gated off by items or abilities. Lacking any detailed map, the game entrusts you to learn the lay of the land, though some appropriately subtle NPC hints provide nudges when needed.
Each step of the adventure through Tenebrous Isle reveals an increasing stack of neatly nested systems. A rally mechanic turns the tide of battle to provide boosted healing in return for damage, a fishing pole sidearm functions as a strange weapon, a traversal tool, and a map-sized minigame. A certain upgrade can even have it summon a river-ready raft anywhere you encounter water.
Nearly every tool in Mina the Hollower serves more than one purpose or intention in a similar fashion, and you'll frequently redefine your favorites. The puzzles and quests are quite physical as well, with fewer simple fetch errands and more outside-the-box thinking, item utilization, or investigative scurrying. Once you realize you can burrow through mouse holes and tunnels, you'll start finding them everywhere you look.
Build-Crafting Your Burrower
Expressive Combat Options and Trinkets Galore
The game's peppy combat is immediately satisfying and only gets better from there. Other than a few weapon upgrades, there are no complicated combos to memorize, with the emphasis instead focused on timing and feedback, on learning enemy behaviors so you can counter and dodge, burrowing to safety or surprise. Certain biomes feature tougher enemies, but you're free to power through them whenever ready, and there are over two dozen bosses (some hidden) to test your builds on.
With 60 trinkets to sniff out, there's more substantive build-crafting in Mina the Hollower than you might expect. Some offer new buffs, moves, and attacks, others protect you from losing precious bones after death, or upgrade your healing abilities. I kept discovering new trinkets after endgame that synergized with others, and the eventual five slots afford numerous combinations and variety.
Tiny bases known as Underlabs dot the map for whenever you need a breather, all squirreled away around the island for Mina to heal and swap gear, though this also resets enemies and map conditions akin to bonfires in a Souls game. Combined with the experience/currency gambit of bones, the game features that same Souls-like-lite sensibility that informed aspects of Shovel Knight.
I chose daggers as a starting weapon, but there's also a gun, a Castlevania-inspired chained flail, a parrying coffin-shield, and a mighty hammer. With weapon upgrades and fifteen limited-use sidearms—including oddball entries like a haunted urn or a bicycle—Mina the Hollower's action is always easy to engage and experiment with, the ideal conditions for a retro-themed Zelda-like.
A Gorgeously Gothic Pixelated Island to Explore
GBC Is The Place To Be
Tenebrous Isle is stacked with secret treasures and traps, room-sized puzzles, hidden NPCs, and countless caches of bones, with Mina the Hollower's economy such that there is usually something worth saving up for. The gothic-styled storyline and theming is only somewhat grim, mixing well with its otherwise upbeat or irreverent humor and a few nice plot twists to boot.
Ossex, as an area, contains the most character (and characters). The city bustles with a busy cavalcade of the game's many NPCs, all of whom can be interrupted for a short piece of dialogue, some of it evolving over time. Nearly every screen of Ossex is layered with secret interactions or treasure, and I found myself returning to it frequently in an "a-ha!" moment to resolve one of its mysteries.
There are seven total Spark Towers to reactivate, each journey presenting its own unique themed adventure. They end with fun chase sequences where Mina rappels upward to outrun a voltage surge, which is definitely the game's most exciting visual display (and would have been tough or impossible to render on an original GBC).
Mina the Hollower's visual style otherwise stays close to its portable console trappings, but it never sacrifices expressiveness or clarity. Its close-up character portraits and splash screens are lovely, but so are the scant collection of pixels on each sprite's face when they're frustrated, elated, sad, or sleepy. Despite the lower-scale resolution, you'll quickly spot where a patch of ground can be burrowed into or not, or determine what differentiates a railing from a jumpable ledge.
A Plethora of Post-Game Pursuits
Mina the Hollower's Post-Game and NG+ Potential is Off the Charts
If you're anything like me, you'll want more Mina the Hollower after it's over. Somehow, Yacht Club Games anticipated this eventuality, and their solution was clear: mods, and lots of them. The options menu is a smorgasbord of accessibility tweaks, challenge modifiers, and randomizers, and there are even custom mod combos with unique challenges that unlock after your first clear. Stacking insta-kill mods turn the game into a "Mina the Hotliner" riff, and it only gets weirder from there.
Seven-staged layers of New Game+ offer additional hooks and mutations, keeping or clearing your inventory, tweaking enemy and boss damage, reducing the number of Underlabs, and boosting Mina's stat cap. For anyone who can't get enough of the game—and I'm right there with you—this is a creative bounty that meaningfully and worthily upgrades the experience after credits roll.
When A Developer Goes The Extra Mile
Beyond Mere Nostalgia, Mina the Hollower Is One of the Year's Best Adventures
There's no hookshot in Mina the Hollower, no bombs or swords or boomerangs. What might appear on the surface as mere homage to Link's Awakening is actually a restlessly imaginative experiment with form. Hyperbole be damned, Mina the Hollower is that rare game that magically de-ages you in your seat, taking you back to when a few chunky pixels convincingly described an expansive interactive world.
Nothing here feels like a compromise or a corner cut. A full run through Mina the Hollower's main quest could take you ten or twenty hours, with some extra left over to scrounge up a 100% completion. By that point, the game had already earned its modest price and burned its brand into my 2026 shortlist, but its considerable post-game potential extends the experience even further.
Accessibility
Best of all, Mina the Hollower is no mere nostalgia bait, proving the player-first design ethos evident in Yacht Club Games' past successes. As much as I love the Blue Burrower, I'm truly grateful that the studio took the risk of this new character and setting and followed it through. If you grew up with old-school Zelda, all the better, but Mina the Hollower is a magnificent adventure regardless of the era, a giddily creative labor of love with no prior experience required.
A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.