Mina the Hollower Hits 93 Metascore as Yacht Club’s $20 Bet Lands May 29

Yacht Club Games releases Mina the Hollower on Friday at $19.99, four years and four months after asking 21,439 strangers on Kickstarter to fund a side project one of its programmers had been building after hours. The current Metacritic average is 93, the highest score posted by any 2026 release so far.

Forza Horizon 6 sits one point behind at 91. IGN’s full review awarded Mina a 10. GameSpot returned a 9. For a studio whose only previous commercial hit is a 2014 platformer about a shovel-wielding knight, the payoff arrives in an unusual currency: a Game Boy Color throwback starring a mouse with a whip, top-rated above every triple-A release of the year to date.

From a Side Project Called Gothic to a 93 Metascore

The project that became Mina started inside Yacht Club’s offices as a personal exercise. Alec Faulkner, then a programmer on the studio’s roster, built a prototype titled Gothic to sharpen his coding and pixel-art chops, with no plan to ship it commercially. Management saw a flagship inside the demo and folded the after-hours experiment into the production slate.

The crowdfunding ask landed on February 2, 2022. The Kickstarter campaign page closed with $1,239,584 from 21,439 backers, supplemented by other crowdfunding channels to clear $1.4 million in committed capital. Sean Velasco, who directed Shovel Knight in 2014, took the helm. Original release target: October 31, 2025. Actual ship date: May 29, 2026, after a six-year build.

Reviewers paid that patience back in launch-week embargoes. Metacritic aggregates 38 critic scores at 93, with eleven graded as perfect tens. The closest contender of the year is Forza Horizon 6, one point behind. The Nintendo Life Switch 2 review filed a 9 of 10 under the headline “Yacht Club Is Back With Another Masterful Love Letter.” The studio that built Shovel Knight finally has its second tentpole.

How Burrowing Became Mina’s Hook

Old-school top-down Zelda games sold their mobility upgrades as banner events. The Pegasus Boots in A Link to the Past. The Roc’s Feather in Link’s Awakening. Each one transformed a methodical map into a kinetic one. Mina ships with the upgrade welded into the protagonist from minute one. The Hollowing ability lets the player burrow into soft soil at any moment, slip under attacks and obstacles, and surface with an extended jump that doubles as a reposition and a dodge in one motion.

You feel that joy when you burrow away from an enemy attack only to quickly circle back to pop out for a quick counter. You feel it burrowing underneath the scenery through a small hole to uncover a labyrinthine secret corridor.

That observation comes from Kyle Orland’s review at Ars Technica, who logged roughly twenty hours and rolled credits at 54 percent map completion. The verb stacks cleanly with combat. Patient positioning beats reflex mashing, basic enemies dart in and out of range, and a refillable potion pack restores health but locks the player into a two-second animation that punishes panic drinks.

The primary weapon is the Nightstar, a whip in the Castlevania lineage. The secondary slot rotates hatchets, daggers, and other sidearms; sixty trinkets sit across the map waiting to be slotted for movement, attack, or defensive buffs. None of the six tower dungeons are gated behind an item from another tower, a structural choice that quietly inverts the genre’s oldest rule.

Game Boy Color Rules, Modern Sensibilities

The team imposed a hard graphics ceiling on itself before frame one of production. No three-dimensional assets. Four colors per tile, the original handheld hardware allowance. The single concession to modern displays is widescreen resolution, because squeezing a current release into a 160-by-144 native canvas would render the game functionally unreadable on any television sold this decade.

The constraint stack the studio published as a design manifesto:

• No three-dimensional assets. Every sprite, tile, and effect is hand-pixeled in 2D.
• Four colors per tile. The Game Boy Color hardware ceiling, preserved on purpose.
• Widescreen rendering only. The sole deviation from period-accurate output.
• Chiptune-first audio. Jake Kaufman composes the score; Yuzo Koshiro of the Streets of Rage soundtracks contributes two guest tracks.

Yacht Club spent six years inside that frame and shipped a world the studio’s own announcement says contains more total screens than the entirety of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. Twenty-five-plus bosses and mini-bosses, a full level-up system, a New Game Plus mode, hundreds of difficulty modifiers. The discipline lives at the asset level. The scope lives in the geometry.

The Zelda-Like Field Mina Just Topped

Top-down action adventure has been indie gaming’s quiet engine for a decade. Hyper Light Drifter shipped in 2016 to broad critical acclaim. Death’s Door followed in 2021. Tunic landed in 2022 and was briefly review-bombed by players who objected to its Zelda parallels. Each title staked out a claim on what a small studio could build inside the genre. None reached the launch-week score Mina has posted.

Two structural choices put distance between Mina and the rest of that field. The first is the burrow verb itself, which lets traversal and combat share the same control input, a design loop none of the four contemporaries built around. The second is dungeon openness; nothing in Mina is locked behind a prior dungeon’s reward, an old Zelda rule the studio inverted on purpose.

IGN’s reviewer wrote that Mina reaches the heights of Zelda, Castlevania, and FromSoft role-playing games in both action and style “and with far fewer resources.” That comp set shifts the conversation out of indie peers and into the source code Yacht Club’s heroes were copying. The studio’s first brand-new intellectual property in twelve years is being measured against the originals.

Twenty Dollars and Six Platforms on Friday

The price across every digital storefront sits at $19.99. Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2, plus macOS and Linux. A Switch 2 physical edition has been announced separately, with no firm street date yet. That sticker undercuts the $24.99 to $29.99 band where indie hits of this scope normally launch, and matches what Death’s Door asked at its 2021 release.

A PlayStation 5 demo went live on February 13, walking players through the opening hours and the first major boss. That window closed weeks ago. On Friday the full game replaces it on the PlayStation Store, Xbox players pick up the release on the same date through Microsoft’s storefront, and Steam preloading is already open. Performance write-ups in early reviews report stable 60-frame-per-second output across the current console generation.

For Yacht Club, the launch-day calculus is straightforward. Twelve million eyeballs touched Metacritic’s homepage in the week after the embargo broke, with Mina sitting at the top of the 2026 leaderboard. That kind of front-page placement converts into Steam wishlists at rates the studio could not buy with marketing spend.

What Yacht Club’s Vindication Buys Next

The Shovel Knight family has sold roughly 2.5 million copies since 2014 and netted Yacht Club somewhere near $40 million after platform fees, according to a Game Developer financial breakdown the studio cooperated with. Every cent of that revenue came from one franchise and its expansions. Mina opens the second column on a studio balance sheet that has run on a single column for a decade.

If Mina sells a million units inside its first quarter on the back of these reviews, Yacht Club graduates from a one-franchise studio into a two-franchise one, and the side project that nearly got shelved becomes the financial proof for the next greenlight. If the sales follow the more common indie curve where critic acclaim outpaces commercial pickup by six to nine months, the studio still owns the highest-rated game of the year and a Gothic mouse with eleven perfect tens to her name. Either branch ends with Faulkner’s after-hours prototype on the resume.

Frequently Asked Questions

When Does Mina the Hollower Release?

Friday, May 29, 2026, simultaneously on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, macOS, and Linux. Preloading is already open on Steam and the PlayStation Store.

How Much Does Mina the Hollower Cost at Launch?

The digital edition sells for $19.99 on every storefront. A Nintendo Switch 2 physical edition has been announced separately, with no firm street date yet confirmed by Yacht Club.

Is It Made by the Shovel Knight Team?

Yes. Yacht Club Games developed both titles. Sean Velasco, who directed Shovel Knight at launch in 2014, also directs Mina. Composer Jake Kaufman returns from the Shovel Knight scores, joined here by two guest tracks from Yuzo Koshiro of the Streets of Rage soundtracks.

How Long Does the Game Take to Finish?

Roughly twenty hours to roll credits on a first playthrough at standard difficulty, based on reviewer logs. Completionist runs go longer because of sixty trinkets to collect, twenty-five-plus bosses and mini-bosses, and a New Game Plus mode added at launch.

Who Funded the Original Development?

The Kickstarter campaign closed in March 2022 with $1,239,584 pledged by 21,439 backers, supplemented by other crowdfunding channels for a total above $1.4 million. Yacht Club funded the remaining six-year build from internal capital generated by the Shovel Knight catalogue.