For eight years, Yacht Club Games was the Shovel Knight studio and nothing else. That was the brand, that was the expectation, and honestly it would have been easy for them to keep mining the same vein forever. Instead they’ve done something riskier with Mina the Hollower: a top-down action-adventure that trades the cheerful platforming of their past for something darker, stranger, and — after spending a good chunk of time with it — a whole lot more ambitious than I expected.
The short version? They pulled it off. Again.
A grim little mystery on a cursed island
You play as Mina, an inventor and engineer belonging to the Hollowers, a guild known for building the kind of technology that reshapes societies. Her friend Baron Lionel calls her to Tenebrous Isle because someone is sabotaging the Spark Generators she designed — the machines keeping the whole place running. Then, before she’s even set foot on land, a massive sea creature tears her ship apart and kills nearly everyone aboard. She washes up alone, surrounded by monsters and locals muttering about “traitors,” and has to fight her way inland just to figure out what’s going on.
What struck me most is how quickly the game teaches you to distrust everything. That unease is the throughline. The townsfolk of Tenebrous Isle talk in a way that feels slightly off. Mina’s old colleague Thorne, the person behind the malfunctioning towers, insists he’s bringing peace and prosperity. Even Lionel, the one friend she’s supposed to lean on, always seems to be holding something back. There’s no tidy happy ending waiting at the finish either — every region tends to close on a note of misery, and the “monsters” you fight often turn out to be victims of terrible circumstance rather than villains.
There’s a real theme humming under all of this. Mina keeps circling the idea of modernization getting forced onto people whether it helps them or not, and who ends up paying for it. Corruption, lost livelihoods, drained resources — Mina stumbles into all of it while dutifully repairing the very towers causing the damage. The story doesn’t lecture. It just lets you sit with the discomfort of a mission that might not be as noble as everyone keeps telling you it is. Little touches sell it, too, like the newspapers that unlock after big events and quietly reframe your good deeds as something sinister depending on which headline you read.
Burrowing changes everything
Here’s where Mina really separates itself from the pack. Forget dodge rolls — Mina digs. Her signature move is a burrow: a quick hop into the ground, a dive beneath the surface, and a pop back out that can carry you a surprising distance. It works as evasion, as traversal across gaps, as a way to slip under walls to reach hidden areas, and as a straight-up speed boost. You genuinely have to unlearn your muscle memory from other action games to get good at it, and once it clicks, it’s fantastic.
The combat is clearly built around it. A lot of the bigger encounters are designed to make you burrow to survive — dipping under an enemy’s attack and surfacing somewhere better. That early sea-monster fight is basically a tutorial in disguise, teaching you to dive beneath its tentacles and strike in the window before they retract. Each boss after that nudges you toward using the mechanic more cleverly, so by the time you’re deep into the generators you’re improvising with it naturally. I’ll admit aerial combat took me much longer to get comfortable with, since the top-down angle makes it genuinely tricky to judge when a flying enemy is about to strike. I ended up leaning on ranged sidearms like the throwing axe to deal with those.
Weapons, trinkets, and a lot of tinkering
You start by picking one of three weapons — fast knives, a versatile mid-range whip, or a heavy hammer that hits in multiple directions — and there are five total to unlock and upgrade, including a mace that turns into a gun and a shield that reflects damage. The whip is the one plastered across all the marketing, and it’s a great default, but part of the fun is that a weapon you love early can get outclassed by something you upgrade later.
Then there are the trinkets, and this is where the build-crafting really opens up. Roughly forty of them, five equipped at once, and they tweak just about everything. Some are simple stat boosts. Others fundamentally change how Mina plays — making a burrow last forever, triggering an explosion when you surface, altering how healing works. One of my favorites hands you an extra life before you lose a Spark, and paired with a faster-healing trinket it made the tougher zones far more survivable. Sidearms add another layer on top, ranging from a bicycle for speed to an orb that summons angry ghosts to a fishing rod for the (genuinely enjoyable) fishing side quest. Half the joy is discovering that a tool from one region is the key to cracking a secret somewhere else entirely.
The leveling nods openly to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, of all things. Enemies drop bones, which double as both XP and currency; hit a threshold and you choose which stat to raise. Die, and your unbanked bones reset to zero. The clever wrinkle is the option to convert bones into bonestone shards, a persistent currency that survives death — a small safety net for when you’ve been grinding and don’t want to risk the walk back.
Punishing, but never unfair
Make no mistake, Mina the Hollower can be tough. But it earns its difficulty honestly. Enemies telegraph their attacks, and once you learn the tells, most encounters click into place. The Spark system softens the sting of death considerably: rather than losing everything the moment you fall, you drop a Spark and can recover it from whatever killed you, which turns each death into a challenge to get back rather than a total loss. Save hubs are frequent enough that I rarely felt buried in backtracking after a mistake.
And if the challenge isn’t landing right for you in either direction, the modifier system is genuinely remarkable — hundreds of options to reshape the game into whatever you want. You can soften pit damage, adjust jump floatiness, make Mina nearly invincible, or crank things the other way by stripping out leveling entirely or cutting your save points. It doubles as a robust accessibility suite, and seeing this much of it available right at launch is honestly rare.
A couple of small gripes
It’s not flawless. Backtracking to grab one missed collectible can be a chore, since fast travel only drops you at one of five train stations and the base’s unlockable map doesn’t reveal quite enough to make navigation effortless. If you’re the type who wants to 100% the island, you’ll be relying on your own memory of routes and shortcuts more than you’d like. Minor stuff, but worth flagging.
The verdict
Mina the Hollower is the kind of game that quietly proves Shovel Knight was no fluke. The story is unsettling in the best way, the heroine is a joy to control, the combat sharpens its demands at just the right pace, and the world is absolutely crammed with secrets worth digging for. Between new game plus and that ridiculous modifier suite, there’s a staggering amount of replayability packed in here.
More than anything, it’s just a blast to play. Yacht Club took everything they’ve learned about smuggling modern design into a retro-styled shell and delivered their new high-water mark. If you’ve been waiting to see whether this studio could stretch beyond the blue knight, wait no longer — Mina’s adventure is more than worth the trip to Tenebrous Isle.
Mina the Hollower is available now on Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
