Review: Mina The Hollower - A Quality Dig

A review copy was provided to us by Yacht Club Games, thanks so much!

I really love Yacht Club Games. Great way to open a review, right? Well, here's another one: I also really, really love Mina The Hollower. The new game from the creators of the legendary Shovel Knight series is back, and once again, to my great joy, we're looking at nothing less than an excellent product. Here's everything I thought about the game.

Town Mouse, Country Mouse

Mina The Hollower puts us in the shoes of Mina, a small and charming mouse known for being a "Hollower" and a genius inventor, who returns to Tenebrous Isle in an attempt to understand what happened to the island's generators (which she herself invented), which suddenly stopped working. The game uses anthropomorphism in all the characters that inhabit the world, as they're all essentially pets/wild animals designed as if they were human. Another point in the game's design favor is its use of stunning and beautiful 8-bit graphics, alongside environmental design and exploration areas all designed with inspiration from the "Gothic-Horror" art style.

Mina The Hollower's storyline is great, and one of its biggest pluses if you ask me is the fact that it's built in a way that encourages the player to explore their surroundings proactively, meaning talking to different characters they meet in hopes of understanding what the next objective is on the journey, as opposed to the more forgiving approach that places a "waypoint" on a compass or map and all you have to do is try to reach that point. This exploration style is of course familiar to us from giant games like the various titles in The Legend of Zelda series (in this case you can compare this game directly to Link's Awakening both in terms of exploration feel and game design, and in terms of story structure).

The design of the different environments and the world of Mina The Hollower gets excellent execution - I really enjoyed wandering around the different areas of the world and discovering them, and the fact that the game doesn't hold your hand at all and allows you to explore it almost in complete freedom works very much in the game's favor, especially because thanks to this small element I got to experience quite a few side storylines I didn't expect as well as discover simply massive amounts of secrets scattered throughout the world. But at the same time, not everything is perfect here, as my main problem with the game is the moments when it feels very difficult to navigate and orient yourself, partly due to the fact that it doesn't include a proper map that allows you to easily understand where you are - a feature I would have been very happy to have in a game of this style in 2026 that would undoubtedly have significantly reduced the amount of "backtracking" I experienced throughout my journey with Mina. Additionally, even though the level and area design itself gets good work (and sometimes no less than perfect) in the vast majority of game areas, there were also some areas that suffered from less quality design and a slightly more frustrating exploration feel, whether we're talking about the various platforming challenges they offered or their artistic/narrative depth.

Going Into Battle

Mina The Hollower's combat system is a pretty interesting blend between a classic action-adventure game (hey there again Link's Awakening) and souls-like games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne - a combination that functions like a particularly sharpened double-edged sword. On one hand, the combat and movement experience in the game is nothing less than amazing: controlling Mina is comfortable and precise down to the pixel level (something Yacht Club Games always knew how to do and the best proof of that is of course Shovel Knight), and this goes up several quality levels when you add to the equation the arsenal of different abilities at Mina's disposal, which includes among other things her signature ability to quickly dig holes into the belly of the earth from which she'll also need to emerge after a few seconds.

This central ability allows for all sorts of interesting actions, such as our ability to lift a large stone that we can throw at an enemy and even our ability to dig a hole behind an enemy in order to hit them from behind (a great solution against enemies holding shields, for example). Outside the combat system too, Mina's digging ability gets simply excellent execution, allowing us to jump greater distances by digging a hole and "charging" an upgraded jump. Its use also comes into play when solving various puzzles and different exploration challenges, and I really loved seeing that the game's developer took this ability to the extreme and really made it the central ability used throughout all the game's hours. As a whole, the feel of using Mina's digging ability is great, and even though it took me a bit of time to sharpen my skill in using it (especially in the game's opening part and its first few hours), in the final analysis I think the execution and use of it here is great, to the level where you can define it as a very quality dance that simply integrates wonderfully with all the different elements of the game, and that I honestly can't see how this game would work without it.

Alongside the digging ability, Mina has at her disposal an arsenal of weapons we can use, with each weapon of course having its unique combat method and its advantages and disadvantages, alongside an entire system of upgrades and improvements, including among other things our ability to upgrade Mina's technical stats (the amount of damage she'll do for example) through an entire sub-system of Trinkets that will improve and change our play style even more and even an entire system of secondary weapons we can use during battles by utilizing dedicated energy.

This is also where that double-edged sword I mentioned earlier comes in, which is related as you've probably already understood to the "souls-like" part of the game. Similar to many other games in the style, in Mina The Hollower too your main upgrade path in the game will be done by investing a dedicated resource (in this case bones) in the various abilities we can unlock along the way, and here too death means losing all the bones you've accumulated up to the moment you were killed, unless you managed to convert a certain amount of bones into a gem that will preserve them for you even if you die. Here too the game works with save points like "Bonfires" that will allow you to refill health, change weapons or withdraw bones from your score bank for investment, but will also revive all the enemies you killed up to that moment, and here too the healing system is built in a way that will require you to think twice if and when to heal due to it being limited in resources and our ability to renew them, alongside the fact that the game requires us to hit enemies in order to fill the health meter that we can then actually heal with, something that raises the difficulty level in a way that sometimes feels too cruel.

Now look, I have no problem with the fact that this game uses souls-like systems, but on the other hand I feel that if this game were simply a charming exploration-adventure game like Link's Awakening with stunning graphics, an excellent soundtrack (and if it doesn't make our year-end soundtrack list I'll be very upset) and an interesting and rewarding combat system, it would have received, at least from my perspective, much more love than it actually got. I will note that the game does allow you to ease the challenge by activating quite a few different Modifiers that can make the game slightly more forgiving, but naturally using them will cancel your ability to achieve various trophies/achievements during the game, and that's a bit of a shame.

The Bottom Line

Mina The Hollower is a game that delivers a great experience - it's fun, it's excellently designed most of the time and it's very rewarding in everything related to the combat system and exploration experience, however for each of these really good elements there's also a negative point, whether it's the difficulty level and reliance on souls-like systems that at times simply feel disconnected from this game or whether we're looking directly at the design of some of the game's areas. Still, this is definitely not a game I'd skip, especially if you're a fan of the genre.