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After years of anticipation, Yacht Club Games delivers a game that is both nostalgic and surprisingly fresh: Mina the Hollower. After hours of exploring its haunted world and getting humbled by monsters and platforming puzzles, this Game Boy Color-style game has quickly become far more ambitious than a simple retro throwback.
What makes Mina so memorable is how confidently it blends old-school design with modern ideas. It draws inspiration from the classics and evolves the formula to create one of the most charming and challenging action-adventure games in recent memory.
You play as Mina, a brilliant inventor and member of the Hollowers, a guild dedicated to studying the earth itself. After the mysterious failure of her Spark Generators on Tenebrous Isle, Mina travels to the city of Ossex to uncover what went wrong and to hopefully fix them. Naturally, things aren’t exactly going to plan when she arrives.
The narrative walks the line between gothic horror and playful adventure. You’ll wander through crypts filled with creatures and then return to town to chat with animal townsfolk from a haunted fairy tale. The world constantly balances darkness with warmth, which gives the game a unique personality all its own.
What stood out most while playing was how much trust the game puts in you, the player. Right from the start, Mina the Hollower gives you the agency to pick your path and encourages you to listen to rumours and read notes, or simply explore one direction to progress. At first, it was a little overwhelming to not know where to go in a game like this, and I genuinely spent a few long stretches wandering Ossex and its surrounding areas just trying to piece together where I should head next.
Surprisingly, that feeling of being slightly lost becomes part of the fun because it invokes mystery and achievement when you find a new area through a new ability you found elsewhere.
There’s also a real sense of mystery hanging over the entire adventure. Baron Lionel, the fallen generators, the hostile creatures, and the bat-like traitor Thorne all hint at deeper secrets and lore underneath the surface. The game doesn’t always tell you everything straight away, so there’s an abundance of hidden pathways and objectives in Mina the Hollower that add to its world’s depth.
The game’s nonlinearity deserves special praise as well. Unlike Shovel Knight, which followed a fairly structured progression, Mina the Hollower often lets you wander into dangerous areas far earlier than expected. At one point, I accidentally stumbled into a region where enemies absolutely demolished me in seconds, but instead of feeling unfair, I was humbled and knew I had a new goal to come back and triumph in this area of a world so unpredictable.
At its core, Mina is an action-adventure game built around platformer movement, a mix of combat options, and experimentation with abilities. Mina’s signature ability, hollowing, lets her burrow underground for brief moments, dodging attacks and crossing hazards while completely invincible. It sounds simple, but in practice, it changes the entire feel of combat and exploration.
Because of abilities like hallowing and the way enemies move, I realised this wasn’t a game where you can just mash attack and hope for the best, either. Even small enemy encounters can become dangerous if you panic or mistime a dodge, because there will be moments where a room full of basic bats and traps completely overwhelms you. Don’t get greedy with attacks instead of properly using hollowing to reposition.
One of the most satisfying feelings is diving beneath incoming attacks, popping up behind enemies, squeezing through hazards, and escaping at the last second. It gives movement a smoothness that is unheard of in this genre. It’s easily one of the smartest gameplay ideas Yacht Club Games has introduced, and it never stops evolving throughout the adventure.
The challenge level is definitely high, though. Some players may find the early hours surprisingly brutal as you’re sort of wandering around like a headless chicken trying to figure out the world and mechanics. Bosses hit hard, and enemy placement is dastardly at times, with certain trap-filled areas or moving platform areas that are also low-visibility, which will have you screaming if you don’t give the game your full concentration. But importantly, the game rarely feels cheap. Deaths usually come from impatience and poor positioning or failing to properly utilise Mina’s abilities.
Combat weapons are wonderfully flexible, too. Mina is offered the Pokemon-esque pick one of three choices at the start of the game, and going with the default whip, the Nightstar, felt satisfying thanks to its directional attacks and snappy responsiveness. Even then, the game constantly introduces new weapons, sidearms, and upgrades you can buy with in-game currency called bones that dramatically change your approach.
I found myself regularly swapping loadouts depending on what area I was exploring and what enemies I was fighting. The twin daggers rewarded aggressive close-range attacks, while heavier weapons felt slower but easier to take out stronger foes. Sidearms, like hatchets, you can throw in the air and land with an additional area-of-effect shrapnel attack, adding extra versatility against flying enemies or ranged threats.
Mina collects trinkets during the journey, which are collectible upgrades that allow her to customise abilities. Some improve survivability, others alter movement or combat utility, and stacking different combinations can lead to trying wildly different playstyles. With so many options in Mina’s arsenal, what’s particularly impressive is how the game avoids making any weapon feel pointless. Almost everything has situational value, and the constant temptation to experiment keeps combat always feeling fresh.
Visually, Mina the Hollower is a stunning and creative callback to classic games. The game fully commits to its Game Boy-inspired aesthetic, complete with limited colour palettes and chunky pixel art, but everything is animated with modern sensibilities and detail. Characters bounce with personality, and every monster moves fluidly. I’d even say some of the bosses are more memorable art-wise than other boss-centric games I’ve played this year.
The world around is carefully crafted, too. You know exactly what type of area you are in just from the motifs you’d learn from these sorts of games, with purple-grey crypts dripped with atmosphere, large red and gold castles, and Ossex, the town itself, feels alive despite its gloomy mood. It’s honestly kind of shocking how much life Yacht Club Games squeezes out of such an intentionally retro, and often limited, style.
The sound design deserves just as much credit. Very early on, the soundtrack stood out to me, with composer Jake Kaufman delivering an absolutely score-packed with catchy chiptune melodies that stick in your head long after playing. Some tracks lean adventurous and maybe more dramatic for those big battles, others unsettling and moody when exploring dark caverns, and many somehow manage to be both at once.
Even more impressive is how polished the entire experience feels. The controls are incredibly responsive, and the animations are smooth despite mimicking retro hardware limitations. I was playing this on the luxury of a Steam Deck most of the time, and it was as close as I’d describe to a flawless handheld experience.