Summer is officially here, and SuperPod Game Club is beating the heat in the only way possible - by playing video games. SPGC normally tackles older games, but this summa' we decided to play something new that most members were pretty interested in - Mina the Hollower. Released May 29, 2026 on Steam and consoles, Mina the Hollower is the latest from Shovel Knight developer, Yacht Club Games, and was originally started as a side project by an employee at Yacht Club. After a super successful KickStarter campaign, the game was greenlit and entered development.
Was Mina worth the wait?
Can it live up to the massive success of Shovel Knight?
Are there any shovels in Mina the Hollower?
Answers to these questions and more in this month's edition of SuperPod Game Club.
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🏆 SPGC Awards - June 2026
This here's a new segment where we'll give out some fun awards each and every month!
First Beat: Jake
Best weapon in the game: Nightstar / whip
Toughest Critic: Thrak
Most Likely to Replay: Matt Storm
June was a pretty rough month for me personally and I really don’t have the energy to go as far into detail with my review as I wanted, so I’m going to keep this as brief as possible. Also, shoutout to my good buddy Thrak for gifting me the game on Steam, I would’ve likely sat this month out otherwise.
I wanted to like Mina the Hollower more than I actually did. On the surface the game checks all of the boxes for something that felt like it was made specifically for me, with its gorgeous pixel artwork, finely detailed environments and some banger tunes that makes it a top runner for best game soundtrack of the year. It has everything you might want from an action/adventure throwback that was very much inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, mixed with the gothic aesthetics of something like Castlevania or even Bloodborne. Unfortunately it fails in some of the areas that matter the most, with several points of frustration in both level and gameplay design that really hold the game back from being something truly special. There are Trinkets you can find throughout the game that can help balance things out, as well as rather in depth accessibility options, but they mostly come off as feeling like a band-aid in place of tightening up some of the game's rougher edges.
Mina the Hollower is not at all a bad game and I would recommend it to anyone that might be interested in it, hell you might end up loving the parts of the game that I absolutely despised. With a bit more polish the Mina the Hollower could’ve easily been an all time classic, but as it stands it’s a good game that I’ll never have any desire to revisit again in the future and will quietly forget about over time.
Mina the Hollower has finally arrived. While a top down adventure is a major genre shift for Yacht Club Games after Shovel Knight, the studio's signature pixel art, character charm, and expert level design are front and centre.
The game’s Link’s Awakening X Bloodborne inspiration is obvious, but Mina carves out its own identity with a unique, Victorian age of industry with a dash of Castlevania vibe. The world size is respectable; featuring clever mechanics unique to each dungeon. A heavy reliance on tricky platforming while dodging enemies can be unnecessarily frustrating however.
Make no mistake, Mina is tough. While not quite a "Soulslike," bosses took me multiple attempts to sort out whether I should use the twin daggers, buster battery gun, or ole fashion whip to take them down. As well, the recurring scaling of tesla towers and its rising "spark line of death" minigame quickly shifts from fun to tedious after a few failed climbs.
While the base level of difficulty is high in Mina, the brilliant choice here is that for every annoying gameplay quirk, there is an equippable Trinket to counter it. Having trouble jumping large gaps? Equip the Wisp to float across. Tired of navigating ice and water? Use the Steady Soles and it's barely a hurdle. If the thought of tracking down items gives you pause, take a look through the extensive list of "cheats" in the modifiers menu letting you completely tweak the difficulty. No shame; I turned off the lightning spark line after my 4th tower, and by the 20th hour when I was ready and done with my time in Mina, I used a damage reduction modifier to avoid repeat attempts on the final boss.
Mina the Hollower might not redefine the action adventure genre the way Shovel Knight did for platformers, but it is a thoroughly solid title that succeeds by putting control of the experience in the player's hands.
Mina The Hollower? But I just met ‘er!
It’s gotta be tough being an indie game dev. If you’re successful like Yacht Club in your debut, that’s all you’re going to be known for- and of all the games to have land, you could do much worse than Shovel Knight. But I get it, you spread him across a bunch of spinoffs and cameos, maybe the next game should be “something else”
Mina the Hollower is definitely someone else, but even with the top-down 2D Zelda perspective there’s a lot of stuff they borrowed from Shovel Knight- the hub village with stuff to find in between missions, the sidearms already borrowed from Castlevania, even having to retrieve things from where you died! I guess someone figured it’d be too similar to Shovel Knight, so they cranked up the difficulty. It's pretty manageable at first for gamers who’ve been through it, but as you get closer to the end it just feels meanspirited. The game lets you flip things in the options (I succumbed and used walk over gaps in the last area), but I think that would have been time better spent making the game good
Mismanagement of some kind led on to a news story saying everything’s hinging on this game for Yacht Club. They sold a bunch already. They should. Its a good game. But Shovel Knight’s in the indie pantheon for a reason. The next thing they put out hopefully remembers why that’s the case.
I can't stop playing Mina the goddamn Hollower. It's so tough and sometimes incredibly frustrating, but I keep crawling right back to it after every death while screaming at the top of my lungs.
Difficulty aside, Mina has some excellent world-building through the various NPCs that you'll come across, and the exploration is so, so, so good. The world has tons of secrets tucked away in various nooks and crannies and rewards you handsomely for going out of your way to find them. Typically you'll be rewarded with bones, which are the game's form of currency and XP, you'll need every last one that you can get so that you not only level-up (which gives you your choice of a power, defense, or sidearm power boost) but you can also use bones to upgrade weapons, buy new trinkets, buy keys to unlock shortcuts and more.
This game may be a little off-putting with the difficulty, but if you stick with it, it'll stick with you.
Yacht Club's newest game sees us playing a retro styled game about digging following their last retro styled game digging? Wait.....
The main problem I have with this game is the clashing of styles. It wants to be equal parts Zelda and equal parts Soulslike, but I find these two genres to not really gel here. I have not played other games that mix the two, so I cannot compare but Shovel Knight had a real nice difficulty curve that kept you locked in from beginning to end. In Mina, the harder sections felt more tedious than necessary and I found myself rather annoyed at certain things the game wanted me to. Also, not having a good sense of direction or teaching the player how to play their game hurt it too. It can be intuitive, but this game comes off as being more proud of itself than it should be, if that makes any sense and while all the modifiers are there to assist, I find that a cop out from just making your game flow feel better.
Despite that, I do like this game. I think the art style is great, I love those little cutscene breaks you get at certain points. Mina is a solid character in a cool, fleshed out world full of personality. I think the game controls fairly well and once you get past the steep learning curve at the start, you get a good feel for it. Music was decent and there are moments where this game truly feels great.
But, I wouldn't say it's a great game. I would say it's good and maybe very good in the right moment, but just good. Doing research on this game and the issues Yacht Club had while making it tend to shine through in the lack of consistency I felt my entire too long playtime of 30 hours. Trim out the Soulslike stuff, make the game 20 hours at best and you have a banger. For me, this didn't hit the heights everyone claims it does. Regardless, I'm glad this is selling enough for the studio to not be shut down and we can look forward to whatever is next.
Absolutely worth the wait. This game hits on all the things I love in one great retro package. An interesting story. Satisfying combat. Challenging platforming and bosses. A fun variety of weapons and sub weapons. Incredible pixel art. Rewarding exploration. Epic soundtrack. It completely delivers on all of it and I love it. It takes inspiration from all the places you'd imagine and makes them its own in one hell of a package. Yacht Club Games continues to astonish and remains one of my all time favorite studios.
P.S. The song Gator Gallop (Nox's Bayou) absolutely slaps and is a gaming music all timer.
Mina the Hollower is a delight. It's a combination of old school aesthetics, brilliant pixel art, challenging mechanics, and whimsical characters.
Mina resembles classic Zelda titles aesthetically, but the gameplay is quite different. Mina is more about combat, platforming, and discovering secrets on every screen. The items (trinkets) primarily improve your ability to fight and maneuver, as opposed to opening up progression.
Visually, it's the little details that make this game so great (which could explain why the game was delayed). I love these limited canvas, limited palette-style games because I truly feel that the limitations breed creativity and every single pixel placement matters. The music is great, though some of the crunchier tunes didn't do it for me. The story is charming but grim, and the jumpscares will get ya!
The game definitely has its annoyances. It is at its most difficult at the start of the game when you're underpowered. Platforming and pits can be brutal, and I found there was just too much guesswork with the precise timing of jumps (the bouncing purple things and wall jumping, in particular).
I reached 96% completion in a very leisurely 36 hours, and I definitely plan to revisit the game soon to check out its "New Game+" mode and modifiers.
Score: A (9/10), recommended
If there’s one indie darling I keep an eye on more than any other development house in the space, it’s Yacht Club Games. So imagine my surprise when I not only got the chance to review their latest release, Mina the Hollower, for Press Pause Radio, but it was also picked to be the SuperPod Network’s Super Game Club title for the month of June.
This was the kind of serendipity that I longed for in life—like opening a bag of El Monterey™ chimichangas and discovering that you just won a lifetime supply of Tapatío® Hot Sauce the moment you open its sweet and spicy bag. I had plenty, and I mean PLENTY, to say about it in my review, mostly all good, really. There is one thing I didn’t really touch upon, however, that I wanted to emphasize for my contribution to the SuperPod Game Club post for Mina the Hollower, and that’s just how engagingly communal this game was when it came to the water cooler discussion of this arguable masterpiece of a game.
Mina the Hollower truly brought back that rare feeling of the recess discussion on the playground where everyone argued about whether or not kneeling for 10+ seconds at the edge of the cliff in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest will actually conjure a friggin' tornado to take you to the next level, or whether or not the tick to getting past the rotating cylinder platforms in Carnival Zone Act 2 of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was to hold Up and then down in succession, even though it doesn’t really look like anything is happening right away.
Getting to hear everyone’s experiences and comparing their notes with my own gave me an entirely different impression of the game, and it went on further to cement my overall adoration for the game, like the different farming spots everyone used to shore up some bones without hours of grinding, or everyone’s different trinket loadout and tips on where to find some of the more significant ones. It was also cathartic to know that the few gripes that I had in my time with the game wasn’t just me being lameass, fuddy-duddy as it turns out that nearly everyone in the Club concurred that the punishment of respawning you all the way to the beginning of a platform puzzle after whiffing a single jump is just punitive as hell, and could have used some more consultation before implemented into the finished game.
Mind you, the whisper network to Mina isn’t anywhere near as dense as something like Tunic; it was still a welcomed angle that helped me formulate some of my overall analysis of the game, because believe me y’all—ain’t nothing more isolating than professionally reviewing a game before its embargo.
Aside from that, it was definitely one of the more rewarding Super Game Club entries I’ve contributed since being welcomed into the fold, and I’m just stoked that everyone else got to share some of the joy and pain with me. If you’re curious to read more about what I thought of the game overall, be sure to check out my full review here, because there’s so much more to gab about when it came to critically looking at Mina the Hollower, and I came away with it being my personal Game of the Year for 2026 as of this writing.
(read the full review here: https://www.presspauseradio.com/presspauseradio/2026/7/3/qcf-mina-the-hollower.html)
Thank you for reading!
Come back next month and see what we have to say about A Plumber For All Seasons - a Super Mario World ROMhack!
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