Mina the Hollower preview: Yacht Club's Zelda homage digs even deeper than Shovel Knight

A few years ago at GDC, I played a public demo for Mina the Hollower, Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games’ long-awaited ode to Zelda’s Game Boy era. I kind of hated it at the time. It didn’t control very well, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do in it, and it was punishingly difficult. It faithfully recreated the look and feel of a Game Boy game, but I struggled to see what it had to offer beyond a nostalgia gimmick.

What a difference years of development time can have on a game. At this year’s GDC, I played another Mina the Hollower demo on Nintendo Switch 2 with a developer from Yacht Club to guide me. When I mentioned that I’d played a slice of it a few years back at the show, they nearly cringed and assured me that I had played a very early version of the game. But this demo, they said, was the real deal. I can understand that response after spending 20 minutes with Mina the Hollower. I’m not sure what changed, but the upcoming indie already feels like it’s going to have as much of a hold on players as Shovel Knight did in 2014.

It’s easy to understand what Mina the Hollower is doing from a cursory glance. It looks exactly like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. You explore a top-down world built from thick pixels, searching for dungeons to clear. The most immediate difference, of course, is that you play as a mouse who has the ability to burrow into any surface and move underground for a bit. That power is used both to activate checkpoints, dodge enemies, pass under gates, and more. It functions like an item you would get in Zelda, but the world is built around it.

That world is much bigger than I was expecting, too. Mina has a non-linear structure where players can search for its main dungeons in any order. Yacht Club says that it's hard to say exactly how long the game is, especially considering that it’s filled with completely optional bosses, but it estimates that the game will take players somewhere between 20 and 30 hours to finish. That’s a chunky game.

I was allowed to go wherever I wanted during my playtime, but my demoist was careful to steer me away from stumbling into the final dungeon. (You can jump into it from the start of your adventure if you so choose, but I’m told that it’s a little ill-advised to do so.) After leaving the game’s main town and fighting through some screens with my morning star, I stumbled out into the world and naturally wound up in a dungeon. The space had a puzzle motif where I had to burrow underneath fallen statue heads to pick them up and carry them back to their rightful place. Doing so would awaken a spirit that would chase me down, a challenge when I had to transport a head through a moving platform gauntlet while dodging the ghost. My demo was filled with moments like that, which fused action and movement mechanics together in a way that feels very much in the spirit of Shovel Knight.

I’m not sure what changed so drastically between builds, but Mina feels exceptionally polished in its current state. It still feels exactly like a Game Boy Zelda game, but the movement is tighter and it feels more forgiving than the last time I played it. Part of the latter is thanks to equippable charms that can help alleviate pain points, like making it easier for me to refill my healing plasma shot or activate a slow-motion dodge. There’s a full RPG layer under that too that feels indebted to Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, as Mina can level up her stats by collecting bones. (Let the record state that this process is formally called “Boning Up.”) It all adds a greater sense of customization and progress to Mina that makes it more than a straight Game Boy homage.

More than anything, though, it’s the allure of surprises that have me eager to play more. There are secrets hidden behind breakable walls, of course, but there are also some much weirder things to discover. Before I left town, my demoist insisted that I talk to a jester and allow them to tell me some jokes on my journey. Sure, why not? Activating that meant that the jester would just randomly pop onto the screen from time to time in pure jump scare fashion so they could hit me with a new gag. It’s a totally optional running joke, but one that gave my short adventure its own story.

If Mina the Hollower has more moments like that hidden throughout its world, I get the sense that I’m going to get lost in it for a very long time. There’s a level of depth to it that already goes far beyond retro nostalgia recreation. I couldn’t see that full scope when I tried to play it a few years ago, but now that I have, I’m clawing at the walls for an official release date announcement.