Mina the Hollower

(available for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. Switch 2 version used for this review)

Mina the Hollower is the latest game from Yacht Club games, the developers behind Shovel Knight, and this is their first new franchise since launching Shovel Knight. It was first unveiled on G4 TV (which shows how long we’ve known about this game and how long development took); Mina the Hollower had a lot of hype around it, which was slightly dulled by the fact that it was accompanied by what felt like an unnecessary kickstarter campaign. This felt egregious at the time considering the success the first game had been. But nevertheless, this game did reach its goal, and it took a long time to come out.

I was hoping to review this game last year around the original Halloween release date, but that was pushed back into 2026, kind of missing a trick in my opinion because this is a very Halloween-y game.

The short of it is that Mina the Hollower follows the order of ‘Hollowers’, which are basically paranormal hunters, in order to rescue a cursed island having a massive outbreak. It’s a very basic set up. Where Shovel Knight took its influence from games like Castlevania and Megaman with a throwback to the classic days of the NES and Super Nintendo, Mina the Hollower is a top-down 2D game with its influences from series like Legend of Zelda and both the artstyle and the gameplay are very reminiscent of the Gameboy Colour game Link’s Awakening.

You can definitely tell that that game played a big part in the game’s influences, but there are other inspirations too, particularly the Souls franchise and a bit of Bloodborne thrown in there too. Essentially, they kind of made a Dark Souls game for kids.

PROS

• Art Style

I already mentioned that this is a throwback to the Gameboy Colour, and it doesn’t disappoint on that front. It does things that you wouldn’t get to work on an actual Gameboy, however, like some of the detail that you get in the full artworks at the start of each chapter (like when you enter a new location) those would just be impossible on an older console like that.

It also has a wider range of colours and makes very good use of them. It gives off the rather spooky feel that you get from Halloween-esque imagery, especially because they have to do different kinds of ghoulish characters for Mina to follow.

The enemy designs are pretty good across the board, especially within the boss fights. They are really quite clever, but I won’t go into too much detail so as to not spoil them, but one of the highlights I would say was one of the early bosses that you fight, who resembles a living statue.

What’s more, Mina has a brilliant design. She’s very basic in one sense but stands out very distinctively at the same time. When she was first revealed I thought she resembled one of the mice from the Rescuers, but I will say that since then they have made her stand out more and I can see this character selling a lot of plushies.

• Combat

The game gives you very traditional combat, you’re given a very basic attack to begin with which resembles the whip from Castlevania, but the game gives you other weapons to unlock and exchange for Bones (the currency) and you don’t want to die without recovering your Spark, because you’ll have all of your Bones taken off you. However, unlike Souls games where you have to get them back at that point where you die, this game is a lot more forgiving and lets you hold onto them. You can even spend them before you end up losing them, and there is a machine in your Burrow which acts as your home base to store some spare ones to cash out at any time you want. This can be useful so you don’t have to worry about losing them. Again, the game does a very good job of allowing you to upgrade things like your attack, defence, and damage from sub-weapons. While there’s not a huge variety of sub-weapons, they do come in handy and you will want to use them at the cost of taking up some resources, which you can refill throughout the environment.

My personal favourite is probably the axe because of its range and shock damage, but I actually didn’t change weapons all that much. I felt like the basic attack was one of my favourites, probably because with the way I was levelling up Mina’s stats, I wasn’t saving up to purchase any other weapons. By the time I got them I wasn’t feeling in the mood to experiment, in fact I spent a lot of my money upgrading my base attack.

One of the things that Mina gets which is excellent is the ability to burrow, which makes you able to find secrets and dodge attacks, but you can only burrow for a few seconds before you’re brought back to the surface so timing is everything. Getting the hang of it is required to reach certain locations, too.

The game offers a few boss fights in multiple locations, but as far as I’m aware, you can tackle these in any way that you want. While it’s quite hard, I would recommend going right from your hometown and keep going in that direction because even though the boss is quite difficult to begin with, the trinket that you get for doing so really benefits you.

Oh yeah, trinkets! They’re basically like extra equipment that you get in an RPG. You get some of them by buying them, finding them in the world, or defeating bosses or side quests. I beat a mini boss en route and got a trinket which allowed me to convert enemies that had been defeated into flies that attack new enemies… it makes sense in context.

It’s all incredibly customisable to people’s playstyles, but I would still recommend doing that boss fight to get that particular trinket early on. It does require doing a bit of an escort mission first. But it’s worth it!

You also have to watch your healing, this is again another Dark Souls influence, but you get a certain number of heals per life, but you do have the ability to upgrade how many you get. However, some areas are locked behind giving up a certain number of heals in order to enter- which certainly made some mini-bosses a lot more difficult.

• Boss Fights

I don’t want to go into too much detail because they’re really good to discover for yourself, but I don’t think I had a single boss fight in this game that I found annoying or unfair. They’re challenging, don’t get me wrong, but they didn’t feel unfair, and that’s really rare in a game.

MIXED

• Story

I didn’t really want to put the story into this category, but I can’t put it into the Cons for being too basic because there’s definitely a lot of effort put into it. There’s a lot of good dialogue with some of the characters and within the world. You’re basically tasked with turning on a series of generators in order to brighten up the island and make the monsters go away, but there’s a little twist partway through the game that was so obvious that I thought it was a red herring. The story never really went in an unexpected direction, and the most amount of character that you get from the game does come from dialogue that you have with the inhabitants, so I can’t fault it entirely. It just won’t be winning many ‘Best Narrative’ awards.

CONS

• No Map

Mina the Hollower’s world is actually quite big, and you can tackle it in whatever order you want- but the game doesn’t give you a map. There is a map available to you at some point in the game, but it’s locked behind a side quest, which I didn’t do. I think that’s a bit of an issue because I don’t want the map to tell you everything, but I did find myself getting lost a lot more than I would like, especially because the world is so big! I think that if it wasn’t for so much dialogue I wouldn’t have realised that one of the areas is only accessible by getting the trains back in service. You’ll spot it throughout the adventure, you go past several train stops and you can donate some bones in order to get it back running, but I think people might not do this early on because they think it’s a form of fast travel- it’s not, it’s required to reach one of the final areas of the game. If you didn’t start saving up for that, you might be locked behind a grinding session for quite a while. Again, I only realised this by chance, and I think a map would have helped slightly.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Mina the Hollower is a triumph of an indie game, this is a great throwback to top-down 2D games and is another entry from Yacht Club Games. I do wish that I found myself getting lost less often and I don’t think that the story is anything to write home about especially since the story in Shovel Knight was so good, but I think that this is a really strong game. The combat is fantastic and is an absolute joy to control, I didn’t even mention how good the soundtrack is either! There’s no framerate drops in my experience, the game ran incredibly stable on the Switch 2. If you have any love for classic 2D games, I urge you to give this one a go, it might be the best one you play all year.

FINAL SCORE: 9.5/10