Mina the Hollower Reviews
Mina the Hollower has the charm of video games that aren't afraid to demand something from the player: attention, memory, curiosity, and a certain tolerance for defeat.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Mina the Hollower is a truly magnificent adventure. Burrowing isn’t just a gimmick; it’s embedded into the experience, creating a synergy between movement, combat and puzzling.
In this lineage, Mina the Hollower, in all its textured detail and ambitious expansiveness, counts as a new high-water mark.
Overall, Mina the Hollower is a well-designed, retro-inspired game. It demonstrates that Yacht Club Games is about more than just Shovel Knight. It looks more like Zelda than it actually plays, making it a tough outing. Plus, there's no map (by default). However, the exploration, lore, graphics, and soundtrack make this a fun journey nonetheless. It'll be interesting to see what's next for the team, though I imagine that's a long way off.
What appears at first to be a return to game design from eras past evolves into something truly special.
Mina the Hollower is another masterpiece from Yacht Club Games, a Zelda style game that manages not only to equal the series that inspired it, but in some ways surpasses it. The world is detailed, gorgeous, and overflowing with secrets. The writing is sharp and often hilarious while maintaining a gothic horror vibe. Best of all, it feels amazing to play, with tons of ways to customize Mina and the game itself to fit your playstyle. It’s filled with freedom and challenge in equal measure, but as a Hollower you are more than up to the task.
Mina the Hollower is a triumphant return for Yacht Club Games, creating one of the greatest retro throwbacks of all time. With its unique burrowing mechanic and challenging combat, this is nothing short of a grand adventure. Its most glaring flaw is that it ends, but at least I can continue playing with plenty of post-game content.
It's been thirty-three years since The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening came out on the Game Boy. It was a shock, then, to see the world of Ze...
Mina the Hollower feels like the result of a studio completely confident in its abilities. Its exceptional movement mechanics, rewarding exploration, challenging combat, and dense world design constantly make discovery feel exciting. Despite it being a little hard for some players, Mina the Hollower is an easy recommendation and very likely Yacht Club Games’ next classic.
A worthy spiritual successor to Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight series, Mina the Hollower takes the studio’s love of retro aesthetics and strange fascination with digging and has crafted a fantastic world to explore, above and below ground.
An intelligently designed action RPG that will scratch the itch to explore and fight big baddies.
Mina the Hollower is a brilliant example of modern retro design, combining exceptional exploration, satisfying combat, and a wonderfully strange gothic world into one of the year's most memorable adventures.
Mina the Hollower is one of the best and most challenging games to come out in 2026. It brings great level design, balanced backend gameplay, and delivers plenty of ways to enjoy it.
Mina the Hollower isn't perfect or even close to it, and given expectations following Shovel Knight, that's kind of disappointing for me. Nevertheless, it's still a very good old-school action-adventure with strong combat fundamentals and undeniable charm.
With Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club Games captured lightning in a bottle a second time. It's a must play experience.
Mina the Hollower is a brilliant 2D action-adventure game that takes clear inspiration from classic Zelda while building something that feels fresh, challenging, and uniquely its own. Its open-ended exploration, clever combat systems, strong sense of discovery, and flexible modifiers make every part of the adventure feel personal. While its difficulty can spike, Mina the Hollower stands out as an instant classic and one of the best games in its genre.
A magical mouse that likes to dig holes and build power generators gets beat up heaps while exploring and that's fun for you apparently. Mina the Hollower is a beautifully realised action-adventure throwback that will be a talked about classic in its own right for years to come.
Mina the Hollower is an action RPG that takes the best of Zelda, Castlevania and the Soulslike genre without ever feeling like a copy. Yacht Club Games builds a dense, challenging, incredibly smart and personality-driven adventure, capable of turning every screen into a continuous discovery.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Not only is the game a worthy successor to Shovel Knight, it's arguably the best title Yacht Club Games has produced. There are a handful of minor flaws — characterization gaps, a telegraphed story, the lack of a detailed map, a late-game difficulty spike — but they're relatively unimportant compared to everything the game does well.
Yacht Club Games somehow successfully marries old school Zelda and Castlevania...with a Souls-like dynamic. It's a beautiful challenge with great retro appeal.