Mina the Hollower — AnálisisEver wondered what Link's Awakening would feel like as hard as a Souls game? The Shovel Knight team built it: burrow under to dodge, surface behind a boss, and the dodge is your attack. It won't hold your hand, though.

No game has any business scoring this high on a Game Boy color palette, and yet here we are.

Mina the Hollower is the new one from Yacht Club Games, the Shovel Knight studio, and its pitch is almost suspiciously simple: take the bones of a Game Boy Color Zelda — the top-down isle, the locked dungeons, the key you needed three rooms ago — and pour Souls blood into the marrow. Death has teeth. Bosses have tells. The map does not love you. It launched on May 29, 2026, and promptly burrowed straight past Forza Horizon 6 to sit at 93 on Metacritic and 91 on OpenCritic, the best-reviewed game of the year so far.

The number worth caring about, though, is zero — as in zero dedicated dodge buttons, zero hand-holding, zero interest in making this easy on you. Mina burrows instead. Drop underground and she is untouchable, sliding beneath an enemy to surface at its back right as the recovery frames open, whip already swinging. Evasion is not the thing you do instead of attacking here. It is the first half of the attack.

That single inversion is the seed the entire game grows from, and it is why a title that looks like a museum piece plays like nothing else on the shelf in 2026. What follows is a closer look at where that idea earns full marks, where the throwback purity bites back, and who should walk away before they ever set foot on the isle. The short version, before we dig in properly: this is a wonderful game that does not particularly want to be wonderful for everyone, and it is refreshingly honest about exactly that from the very first screen.

A cursed isle and a maintenance job: the plot keeps its head down

The hook is plain enough. Mina is a celebrated Hollower, shipped off to a cursed island with one assignment: relight the dimmed Spark Towers, tower by tower, until the road dead-ends at a villain named Thorne.

That opening actually sets the tone for everything: the game does not stall or stall for mystery. Mina is here to do a job, and so are you. The towers light up one by one, and they double as the clearest progress bar in the game — you always know where you are headed and how many spires remain. That transparency is oddly reassuring, because it frees the game to pour its energy into what happens inside each tower rather than into stringing you along with narrative bait.

If you grew up on handheld Zelda, you can walk this floor plan blind — clear a dungeon, claim a tool, use the tool to crack the next region open, fell the boss guarding the spire. Mina does not pretend otherwise. You can read the broad shape of the journey within the first hour, and that is the story's honest weakness: the spine is predictable and the Thorne arc is thin, too thin to carry the long stretch before the credits. Nobody is staying up late to learn what happens next; they are staying up late to clear one more dungeon.

Where Tunic withholds, Mina pushes you forward

Set Mina beside Tunic, the other modern throwback that mines top-down Zelda, and the contrast sharpens. Tunic builds its spell out of a manual you cannot read; every decoded page is a trapdoor swinging open.

Mina wants none of that mystery. It wants momentum. The pull is the gothic air and the density of the fighting, not the riddle of the next sentence. That is not a flaw so much as a different appetite — some players want a story to chew on between fights, and Mina would rather hand them another fight. Where Tunic asks you to sit with confusion until it blooms into understanding, Mina keeps a boss in your face and a whip in your hand, trusting that the next great fight is a better hook than the next great secret. Neither approach is wrong, but they reward opposite temperaments — the patient archaeologist versus the player who wants the dungeon to fight back. Both games are lovely; the hooks simply point in opposite directions, and it is genuinely worth knowing which kind of player you are before you commit a single evening to either.

The islanders carry the weight the main quest cannot

What the critical path withholds, the side content quietly repays. The residents of this isle are written with more texture than the premise promises, and the side quests swing across a wide tonal range.

These islanders are not quest-dispensing furniture. They have names, tics, and small private agendas, and finishing one of their threads usually hands you a sliver of the isle's history. The game has no sprawling cutscenes to deliver its lore; it scatters that lore through these back-and-forth exchanges and errands and trusts you to collect and assemble it yourself, which is a far more flattering way to be told a story.

One minute a Duke has you chasing his missing Duchess for a laugh; the next, a thread tips into something genuinely dark and strange. That flicker between bright and grim is the gothic dividend — bright and cute is not the dialect here; cursed isles, Victorian monsters, and silent graveyards are. And do not let "predictable" fool you about the finish. A handful of late moments land the cumulative weight of everything you burrowed and bled through, in a way the early hours never advertise. It is not plot twists doing the work. It is the residue of a journey you walked yourself. The story will never top the scorecard, but it knows its job: hold the world and the mood steady underneath the play, never grabbing the spotlight, never dropping the ball.

Jake Kaufman built a Game Boy that never shipped

Here is the detail that knocked me flat: this score is not a chiptune filter slapped over modern melodies. It is a piece of hardware archaeology done in earnest.

First, the difficulty of the trick deserves spelling out. Retro chip music is a glut in the indie scene; any tracker can pour a melody through an eight-bit filter and call it a day, and the result is usually a modern arrangement wearing an old coat. Mina refuses that shortcut entirely, and the refusal is what makes the score special rather than merely pleasant.

Jake Kaufman — virt, the man behind Shovel Knight, Crypt of the NecroDancer, and the Shantae games — knows this lane cold. This time he went further. He took the native Game Boy sound channels and stacked a Konami SCC+ expansion chip on top, a chip that only ever sang in a few Japanese MSX titles like the MSX Castlevania and never once shipped inside a handheld cartridge.

Using the Furnace tracker, Kaufman wired the two together right at the edge of plausibility: had a cartridge with a Konami enhancement chip actually existed for the color handheld, this is exactly the sound it would have made. There is a real restraint at work — he never reaches for instruments the imaginary hardware could not produce, which is precisely what sells the illusion. The pedantry is the point, and it rhymes with the whole game: eight-bit logic, refined for now. He is not being nostalgic. He is quietly finishing a hardware timeline that history left blank, and the music sounds haunted by a console that should have existed but never did.

Ninety-six tracks, four hours, free — and it earns every one

A gimmick is only worth as much as its follow-through, and the follow-through here is enormous. The soundtrack runs ninety-six tracks and pushes four hours, and it went up free on video and streaming platforms the day the game launched.

Giving away a soundtrack that could have sold as a standalone album, on launch day, is its own kind of statement: the team is supremely confident in this music, and treats it as a sibling work rather than a garnish. That is a lavish haul for an indie, and it arrives with Yuzo Koshiro guesting on two tracks — the Streets of Rage and Ys composer, one of the defining voices of the chip-music golden age, a real treat for anyone who was there.

Better still, the music does not stop at pretty. It works the room. Exploration runs cold and lonely, leaning on sparse, minor-key loops that make the isle feel abandoned even when it is crawling with things that want you dead. The instant a boss commits, the melody climbs and shoves that read-the-tell, burrow-the-window pressure to its peak, syncing your adrenaline to the bar line. Pair a whip with a soundchip that bows to Castlevania and the systems are biting into each other rather than running on separate tracks. Frankly, the score is one of the year's quietly great ones — worth an unhurried listen with the controller down, the way you'd play a record rather than a game. Months from now, when the dungeons blur together, the music is what you will still hum.

It helps that the mix is clean on every output, from a Switch handheld speaker to a proper headset, where the panning on the percussion and the bite of the lead channels come through with surprising clarity for a soundchip homage. Yacht Club could have phoned the audio in and leaned on the visual gimmick; instead the score is doing genuine narrative and combat work, and it is a big reason the whole package feels considered rather than merely cute. Give it the four hours and it rewards the attention, the way the best game soundtracks reward listening on their own terms, untethered from the screen that birthed them.

Real Game Boy rules, pushed all the way into the dark

Pixel art is everywhere, and most of it is a high-res image wearing a nostalgia coat. Mina is the rarer thing: art that actually obeys the color limits and sprite dimensions of the Game Boy Color.

That kind of discipline sounds like a self-imposed headache, and it is, but the payoff is real: in an era drowning in pixel games that increasingly resemble one another, Mina is instantly recognizable from a single screenshot. It does not merely look retro; it is retro, down to the breathing room around every sprite.

That discipline is what buys the look its identity. The game drags those old constraints as far toward gothic horror as they will go — a cursed isle, Victorian monster designs, graveyards and spires drawn in a palette darker than any handheld Zelda dared.

The gloom squeezed out of a restricted palette becomes the signature. You can feel that every pixel was placed for a machine that does not exist anymore, not downsampled from a 4K canvas, and that constraint paradoxically reads as craft rather than limitation — the artists are showing off inside a cage they built on purpose. Good luck finding a second indie in 2026 that looks like this. Where most Zelda-likes go bright and friendly, Mina commits to the murk, and the commitment is total: even the menus and item icons keep the funereal mood. Stand it next to Tunic — clean, low-poly, sunlit 3D — and the two sit at opposite poles of the retro spectrum, proof that "throwback" can branch into wildly different flavors instead of one beige nostalgia.

A world stuffed with secrets, navigated by a map that resents you

On the level of place, the isle is dense. Hidden rooms and secrets are tucked into nearly every corner, false walls beg to be burrowed under, and the layout constantly rewards the instinct to wander off the obvious path and circle back later with a new tool.

This part is excellent, and it is where the art and the design shake hands — a screen that looks like a dead end on a GBC palette usually is not one, and learning to distrust your own eyes is part of the pleasure. Burrow under a wall on a hunch and pop up in a vault you had no reason to expect, and the whole island starts to feel like a magician daring you to find the trick. The visual restraint actively serves this: because everything is rendered in the same tight palette, a slightly off-color tile or an unnaturally smooth wall reads as a clue rather than noise, turning the art style itself into the game's quietest hint system.

The friction is the navigation. There is an island map, but no detailed view in the Zelda or Metroidvania sense, and certainly no quest markers. The intent reads loud and clear: the designers want the old feeling of charting your own course, maybe with a notepad by the keyboard.

To some that fixation is romance; to others it is plain getting-stuck, because a world this detailed leaves you squinting at a map with no idea where to go next, and discovery curdles into wandering in circles. I felt both, sometimes in the same hour — the thrill of cracking a route I'd missed, then twenty minutes of dead-end backtracking that drained the thrill right out.

It is the purest example of the game trading modern comfort for retro faith, and your mileage depends entirely on why you came. The upside on the visual side is concrete, though: pixel art asks almost nothing of the hardware, every platform runs identically, and handhelds are the sweet spot — pick it up on a commute and you are back on the isle in seconds.

Burrow: when dodging and hitting become one motion

Mina has no roll. She burrows. The moment she drops underground she is untouchable, slipping beneath enemies, hazards, even certain walls.

At first you may file it away as a reskinned roll, and then you play and discover it is nothing of the sort. A roll is fundamentally about buying distance and trading it for safety; a burrow not only makes you untouchable but plants you exactly where you most want to be — behind the enemy. That small distinction rewrites how you read every encounter, because you stop thinking "how do I survive this swing" and start thinking "how do I use this swing to get behind him."

It sounds like a plain i-frame dodge until you hear the second clause: surface behind the enemy, land squarely in the recovery window of its swing, and crack the whip. Most boss tells are tuned along exactly that line — dive, slip behind, surface, strike — which loads an offensive intent into the act of evading that a simple roll never carries. A roll buys you distance; a burrow buys you a free hit, and the difference reshapes how you think about every encounter. The game makes you read the attack instead of merely surviving it, and the best fights turn into a kind of underground dance where the safest spot and the best damage window are the same spot. This single idea sutures the Souls pleasure of pattern-reading to the box-canyon traversal of top-down Zelda, and it is the smartest, most singular thing in the whole package. Everything else orbits it.

One locked weapon, one shape for the whole run, and a few stubborn rough edges

At the start you pick one primary — whip, maul, or twin daggers — and you are stuck with it; no casual swapping later. The constraint is the point, because it forks how the run actually plays.

That locked choice is a bold call. Most action games trip over themselves to let you swap weapons on the fly for every situation; Mina does the opposite, telling you to solve the entire run with the tool you committed to at the door. The result is that the three weapons feel like three different games rather than three damage numbers, and the decision colors every fight that follows.

The Nightstar whip keeps range and lets you kite; the Blaststrike Maul hits like a truck but recovers slowly and lives and dies on positioning; the daggers are fast and demand you crowd the enemy's face. Commit to one and the whole run bends around it — your spacing, your boss approach, even which sidearms feel worth carrying. Layer the world's sidearms — throwing axes, boomerang knives, a poison gas pump — over a deep bench of trinkets, and the build space is genuinely wide, the kind of thing you keep tinkering with between deaths. The 25-plus multi-phase bosses are where it all gets examined, with Souls difficulty as the seasoning. Be precise about that word: the Souls in Mina lives in the death stakes, the boss tells, and growth-by-practice rather than growth-by-stats, but the skeleton stays Zelda — dungeons, keys, a new tool opening a new door. It is not a top-down Soulslike. That hybrid is why IGN and Eurogamer handed out perfect marks while one dissenting outlet shrugged that it falls between two stools: the same mixed DNA reads as "finally a real challenge" to a Zelda fan and "not pure enough" to a Souls diehard. The one genuinely awkward edge is that Mina attacks only in a straight line along her facing — fine head-on, miserable against flyers and diagonal movers until you reposition with a burrow or a sidearm. Like the map, that stiffness is old-school faith, not oversight; the developers clearly decided that the constraint sharpens your spacing rather than dulls your fun. Flip it around and the same restriction is what forces you to master spacing, tells, and loadouts more thoroughly, so that finally clearing a boss that wrecked you an hour ago feels genuinely earned rather than handed over. If the hardcore is what you came for, the friction is the flavor, not the bug.

Twenty hours to roll credits, thirty-six to gut it, the real tail in NG+7

Mainline it and Mina runs you about twenty hours; chase every secret, room, and collectible and a full clear lands near thirty-six.

Plenty of games today try to bully you with raw content volume — bigger maps, more question marks — and most of it is watered-down fetch work. Mina runs the other way. Its twenty-hour main line wastes almost nothing; a new tool, region, or boss lands every hour or two, so the "just one more room" pull stays alive late into the night with barely a stretch of busywork between the highlights. For a top-down action-adventure that is a meaty, well-paced figure rather than a padded one.

The real longevity, though, lives in the difficulty ladder rather than the runtime. The game offers a New Game Plus that stacks all the way to a seventh tier, NG+7. Credits are the starting line; each rung makes enemies meaner and your margin for error thinner, wringing your read-the-tell, burrow, and loadout fundamentals dry until the muscle memory is the only thing keeping you alive. It is a dedicated track for the hardcore — finish the main story and bow out gracefully, or keep climbing into ever more punishing air, each tier a fresh interrogation of your ceiling and a quiet flex once you clear it.

Replay here means re-reading the isle through a different weapon

Pull the content apart and Mina's bulk is lateral, not vertical. It does not pad the runtime; it hands you enough variables to want to recombine and replay, a content philosophy closer to roguelikes and action games than to the one-and-done march of a traditional adventure.

This matters enormously for value. Play through once and put it down, and twenty hours is fair for the money but nothing remarkable; get hooked enough to restart with a fresh weapon, and the real playtime balloons, with every pass functioning as a new puzzle rather than a rerun. The locked primary all but guarantees it: run the whip this time and you will itch to try the maul or daggers next, and the three feel like three different combat logics — steady, heavy, fast. A boss that bullied you with the whip can fold in seconds once the maul is in your hands, and that recontextualizing is half the fun. Stack the sidearms and trinkets on top, and every new run is a fresh way of re-reading the same isle and the same bosses. Add the hidden rooms scattered everywhere and the 25-plus bosses, and the tail is long for anyone willing to dig. The content gripes are minor. There is no paid add-on yet — though that free four-hour, ninety-six-track soundtrack is a collectible in its own right, content of another kind. And the small annoyance returns: a picked-up weapon auto-equips, so swapping back to your preferred primary mid-explore means a trek to a checkpoint, a needless little record-scratch on the momentum. Neither is a dealbreaker, but both are the kind of snag that wrinkles your brow mid-session; a simple manual-confirm prompt on pickup would erase the second one entirely, and it is the sort of thing a patch could fix in an afternoon. On the whole, measured by fun extracted per hour, Mina punches well above its price among indie action games. The more you dig in — literally and figuratively — the more it pays back, and twenty hours in I still wanted to start over with a different weapon in hand. That itch to immediately replay, rather than shelve the thing, is the surest sign a game's content design is working, and Mina has it in abundance.