Why You Should Be Excited For Mina The Hollower
If you are into retro-revival indie games, you are likely familiar with the name Shovel Knight. It was an incredibly popular and successful platformer game made by indie studio Yacht Club Games in the style of retro Super Nintendo Entertainment System (or SNES if you’re cool) games. Shovel Knight is one of the biggest indie success stories, being crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2013 and releasing the following year, becoming so popular that the titular character cameos in the Super Smash Bros series and has become one of the major faces of indie gaming. The game has received a long series of collaborations with other franchises, spawning 3 DLCs for the original game and plenty of spinoffs since release.
But the question is: Have you heard of Shovel Knight’s little sister, Mina The Hollower? Well even if you haven’t, you should be excited!
Mina The Hollower was also crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2022, raising over $1.2 million. It is an isometric action-adventure game made in the style of the Gameboy Color era, following the titular whip-wielding mouse inventor and adventurer, Mina, through a gothic-horror inspired adventure. The inventor mouse travels across the Tenebrous Isle to discover why her Spark Generators that she created to power the island have shut down, making use of her “Hollowing” ability, which lets her quickly burrow underground to dodge attacks and traverse the environments.
Mina The Hollower (or MtH for simplicity’s sake) wears its inspiration on its sleeves. It owes its unique visual style and gameplay to The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Seasons & The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Ages pair of Gameboy Color games, that are modernly fondly remembered for their charming pixel art, classic The Legend Of Zelda puzzle solving and dungeon crawling, and unique feel in the larger series. This instantly makes MtH stand out from the crowd due to the fact there are not many retro-revival games mimicking this specific style or era, so even among Yacht Club Games’ other games it feels unique. Not to mention it is also self described as “a souls-like meets Castlevania”, which should pique the interest of many. It is rare to see gothic-horror in a retro-style game like this outside of the Castlevania series and its spiritual successors. And MtH is fully diving into such aesthetics to chilling and amazing results.
We also cannot ignore Yacht Club Games’ track record for making amazing games. Their ability to recreate the feel of classic retro games while still keeping them as fluid as modern games is something to be commended. Some of my own best early gaming memories come from bouncing around in Shovel Knight, which only makes me more excited at the prospect of them expanding out further into new genres. And I hope it excites others equally.
In a post made to Bluesky, Yacht Club Games stated that Mina The Hollower will be even larger than all of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove combined. Specifically they promise that the game will have more screens than all four campaigns within Shovel Knight. If you don’t know, older games break levels and areas into screens. Which is a smaller section large enough to fit on the screen and split up by loading screens. They help the limited ability of older game consoles create larger levels without trouble. And Mina The Hollower basically has more than four games worth of these screens inside it, promising a massive game!
But outside of your excitement for the upcoming game that I’ve hopefully inspired in you, there does lurk trouble under the surface of Mina The Hollower. Mainly that Yacht Club Games, a small indie studio(having only 19 employees as of February 2022) that has made one of the most successful indie game series, teeters on the edge. With their latest game one of the few things that can keep them from going under.
MtH was originally slated for a October 31st 2025 release, but had to be delayed last minute by Yacht Club Games’ need for more time to polish and balance the game. Which already implies trouble for the studio even if you didn’t know about the rest of this game’s troubled development. Now it has a release set for Spring 2026 as of writing this article, but the studio is still facing difficulties. They have themselves admitted that Mina The Hollower is a “make-or-break” for them. The only games made by Yacht Club Games have been Shovel Knight related, which is mainly why they decided to shift focus to a new IP to avoid burnout on all sides. And unfortunately the studio has been hit time and time again during MtH’s development: Starting when the Covid-19 Pandemic put massive delays on MtH at the start of development, and followed by a series of smaller delays culminating in the recent AI craze within the video game industry that has further put the squeeze both on MtH and Yacht Club Games as a whole. Mina The Hollower was not planned to have a six year development, but it’s what they ended up with. Already putting a challenge on this mouse’s shoulder in the already fickle video game industry before her game is even released, making MtH very much in need of a win.
Even still, Mina The Hollower has a lot to offer outside of pure pity points. It is still a beautiful pixel art game that harkens back to the classic Gameboy Color era, wrapped up in a wonderful gothic horror aesthetic. There also comes the promise of this game being full of content, including 25 bosses and minibosses to face, trinkets to collect, and weapons to master. And with the amount of post launch love Shovel Knight got with new campaigns, I’d doubt Mina’s journey will end any time soon. There is so much to be excited for with the coming release of the game in the next few months— at least 21K backers on Kickstarter seemed to think so!
So, will you be delving down into the horrific dungeons with Mina this spring?
