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Mina the Hollower is My New GOTY
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Iain McParlandIain McParland
| July 15, 2026
| Video Games
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Yacht Club Games is most famous for Shovel Knight, the retro-inspired 2D platformer featuring a gardening-tool-wielding knight. Their most recent game, Mina the Hollower, takes its inspiration from NES-era Legend of Zelda games, featuring challenging combat, tools and trinkets, dungeons, and puzzles.
I had been keeping an eye on Mina the Hollower for a while, even putting it on my Top 10 AA and Indie games to look out for in 2026 at the beginning of the year. This is despite this type of game not being in my usual repertoire. I’ve never played a Zelda game, so I don’t have any nostalgia nor deep-seated love for a 2D dungeon-crawling action-adventure
I had no idea that I would love it so much that it would become my current GOTY. Let me tell you why it did.
Story
Mina is a Hollower, a revered inventor and craftsperson who, long ago, fitted the Tenebrous Isle with Spark Generators. They are these big towers that generate energy to power the island… or they were. Lionel, the leader of the island’s capital, Ossex, has written to Mina, asking her to return to fix her Spark Generators that have begun to fail. If she won’t, then the Tenebrous Isle will surely fall into ruin amid a heinous rebellion from Thorne, a troublesome miscreant, and an infestation of monsters from all corners of the island!
Mina experiences this as soon as she gets close to Tenebrous Isle when a gigantic monster attacks and destroys her ship. Fighting her way through rebellion forces, monsters, and across SO MANY PITS, Mina finds her way to Ossex, meets up with Lionel, and gets to work fixing the generators. Her journey takes her far and wide, meeting the normal folk (and not-so-normal folk) of Tenebrous Isle. It’s up to you to decide whether to help them all or remain focused on the larger problem at hand: the generators.
But is there something more sinister going on at the heart of this? Only time will tell…
Modern Classic Zelda Soulslike
On the face of it, Mina the Hollower looks like a straight-up Zelda clone, and while its influences are apparent, it’s so much more than that. The 8-bit 2D top-down graphics, the deceptively simple-looking combat, and the dungeon-crawling gameplay certainly give a nod to Link, but that’s just scratching the surface. In fact, its gameplay loop is more akin to Bloodborne than you would have thought.
Mina’s combat looks easy enough to master, but the enemies pack more of a punch than you might think. A Hollower can burrow into the ground, which acts like a dodge roll (with slightly trickier timing where you have to anticipate moves because Mina jumps up before ducking underground). The burrow can also let you jump across wider chasms and actually makes you dash too! The combat is a balance of risk and reward, utilising a system similar to the rally from Bloodborne. The more you attack and don’t get hit, the more health you can heal with a potion. If you DO get hit, though, that hard work was for nothing.
But the Soulslike DNA is more deeply ingrained than simply the combat. It has (the equivalent of) bonfires where you save your progress, refill healing potions, and tinker with your builds. Because Mina is definitely an action-RPG in that way. You can funnel bones (the game’s currency) into three different attributes: strength, defense, and magic, which affect your secondary weapons that have limited ammunition. You also find a whole boatload of trinkets that can synergise with each other and your build. I sometimes went into battles with a steady-eddy build that was good for exploring, but then I had to switch it up to boost speed, strength, or even allow AOE attacks. The opportunity for experimentation is wild.
The bosses are awesome and varied, with some requiring you to tackle them like puzzles, and some that were full-on tanks that just needed good timing with burrows and attacks. Either way, traversing a dungeon and finding out what lies in wait is an awesome experience. That goes for enemies off the beaten path, too! The optional side-quests and areas are all freaking great. And the choices you make on your way can result in VERY different endgames. Hell, choices that you make that you don’t even realise ARE choices can affect your ending, and that’s awesome.
Retro 8-bit Style
The 8-bit style is something that you either vibe with or you don’t. My first console was the 16-bit Sega Megadrive, so even this is before my time. It does remind me a lot of the kind of style we experienced with the Game Boy Color, though obviously a lot more advanced, beautifully rendered, and stylised in such a way that was never possible on those handhelds. The environments are very pretty, and the areas are all distinct from one another, making it fairly easy to find your way through the maze of Tenebrous Isle, even without a map being available (at the beginning).
I played Mina the Hollower on my PS5, and it looked great. However, depending on your TV size, those low-pixel sprites miiiiight start to look a smidge off. 8-bit graphics, as is their nature, look better on smaller screens, which is why I alternated between my TV and PlayStation Portal. Playing Mina the Hollower on a handheld took me back to my childhood, and it plays how you THINK games back then played (but they actually don’t because they old as f*@$ now).
The chiptune soundtrack was composed predominantly by Jake Kaufman, who absolutely kills it with atmospheric bangers for each area on the island, plus the caves and unique boss music. These tracks are earworms, and the Central Ossex theme got stuck in my head after every play session. Mina the Hollower also pushed the boat out to get legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro to guest on the soundtrack. YES!! The AMAZING Streets of Rage composer created two tracks for this game!
In my 20-ish hours of playing Mina the Hollower, I didn’t have one bug, graphical issue, or softlock. It ran pretty perfectly.
A Game for Everyone
Accessibility. For some corners of the internet, accessibility is a dirty word. It’s something that should be stamped out of games because using those options goes against the developer’s “true vision”. This is something often heard when talking about Soulslike games, with people bitching and whining about how people want to make them baby games
Don’t like the whole Souls thing where you lose your currency when you die? Turn it off. Always struggling for save points? Add some more. Not doing enough damage? You can decrease damage taken and increase damage given. And there are soooooo many other settings to tinker with if you so wish. It’s your prerogative. But it’s not just modifiers that make the game easier; you can turn on options that make the game harder, or just plain weird
There are 65 modifiers available to play with before you roll credits for the first time, and over 200 afterwards. This is truly a game for everyone – a game you can tailor to your own desired experience. I will say, for clarity, I used default settings when I played and rolled credits on Mina the Hollower. However, I will always advocate for anything that removes the barrier to entry for such an amazing game.
Summary
I want to frame this right. I’ve never played a mainline Zelda game, so I don’t have nostalgia for that type of game. I’m not really a Soulslike guy either, having only completed Bloodborne, Lies of P, and Thymesia before this game. I did have a Sega Megadrive (Genesis), but I was a Sonic kid, so I was really concerned about what my reaction to Mina the Hollower would be
I f@*!ing love this game
I love everything about it. The level design, visuals, music, story, and gameplay are all terrific. However, this game also has the innate ability to make me smile with its cast of characters and its surprises awaiting you around every corner. There is a moment towards the end of the game where it tells you that you could have been playing differently all along, and it was absolutely shocking. I rolled credits after almost 20 hours, but there is SO MUCH MORE I could have done
Mina the Hollower is a fricken masterpiece that more people should be playing. It’s out now for PC, PS5, XBOX Series S/X, and Nintendo Switch 1/2 for around $20. And that’s a steal.
What did you think of Mina the Hollower? Will this keep GTA6 off the top of the OpenCritic charts in 2026? Do you wish you could burrow under the ground without getting filthy? Let us know in the comments!
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