Mina the Hollower Review: A Real Game Boy Game, Frustrations Included

Mina the Hollower finished third in this year's biggest player poll and picked up some of the highest review scores of 2026. It has also been called overrated by people who finished it and did not enjoy the last few hours. We have seen the same game described as a masterpiece and as a frustrating exercise in archaic design, and after playing it, we think both descriptions are accurate.

Here is why. Yacht Club Games did not make a game that looks like a Game Boy game. They made a Game Boy game. The four-direction attacks, the punishing knockback, the screens that reset when you fall, the grind before you are strong enough to survive — none of that is an accident or an oversight. It is the genre, faithfully rebuilt, including the parts that people have spent thirty years quietly agreeing were annoying.

Whether that is a triumph or a mistake depends entirely on what you wanted. What we can tell you is that this is the most beautiful, most confident, most irritating game we have played this year, and that there is a menu buried in the options that can change almost all of it.

Start with the part nobody argues about. This is one of the best-looking pixel art games ever made, and the detail is genuinely absurd. Roof tiles. Gravel on a pavement. Character portraits. NPCs walking their own routes through the capital who you will stand and watch out of pure curiosity. It uses a Game Boy Color palette and it is doing things with that palette that no actual Game Boy Color game could have dreamed of.

The regions are all mechanically and visually distinct. A swamp with water levels that rise and fall. An autumn town where the wind decides whether your jump lands. A graveyard that descends into a ruined underground palace. The dead insides of something enormous. Each one has its own rules and its own look, and the art is doing half the level design's job, telling you where you can burrow and what you can break without ever putting an icon on it.

The music matches it. Jake Kaufman is back from Shovel Knight, this time working with Yuzo Koshiro of ActRaiser and Streets of Rage, and the result is chiptune that carries the mood of each region without ever drowning out what you are doing. We noticed the boss themes before we noticed the bosses.

The writing is better than it needs to be too. Mina is an inventor whose own spark generators have failed across the island, and she has been called back by an old friend who is behaving oddly about it. It is a straightforward setup surrounded by genuinely strange side material — a possessed house that tries to crush you, farmers slowly turning into tomatoes, a funeral held for a sentient leaf that you personally landed on. It knows exactly when to be silly and when to stop.

Mina can burrow into the ground and burst back out, launching herself into the air. That single move is the whole game. It is your dodge, it is your jump, it is your traversal, and it is how you get behind things. Burrowing away from something as it swings, coming up behind it and catching it with the whip is a genuinely great feeling, and the game keeps finding new uses for it — swimming through a bayou, timing a launch against the wind, cutting up through a forest canopy.

The combat around it is deliberately simple. You attack in four directions. That is it. Enemies, meanwhile, come at you from every angle they like, and if something approaches from the top-right you have no clean answer to it. Some weapons and sidearms partially solve this, but not many, and it never stops feeling like a restriction rather than a design choice. This is the single most divisive thing in the game and it is worth being clear about: it is not a bug, it is fidelity to an era, and whether you can accept that is going to decide your entire experience.

Healing is the other sticking point. Damaging enemies fills a yellow recoverable portion of your health bar, which you then convert with a vial — but using a vial means disengaging, and plenty of enemies close that gap faster than you can drink. The intention is clearly Bloodborne's rally system, where aggression is its own reward. In practice it often becomes hit something twice, retreat, apologise, drink, return. It works. It is just never as satisfying as the thing it is imitating.

The platforming is the problem. Not the jumping itself, which is fine, but what happens around it. Enemies knock you a long way when they touch you, and there are a great many pits, and the two facts combine constantly. You will be crossing a difficult stretch, something will fly into you, and you will lose the screen. Then you do it again.

Several later areas also stack their gimmicks past the point of fun. One region asks you to judge the wind before every leap. Reasonable. Then it adds lightning that you have to shelter from on a timer. Then it adds indestructible balls that chase you. Then it puts all three in the same room before a boss, with a hazard that can throw you back to the beginning of the section. There is a dark area navigated by following a firefly whose light is also perfectly capable of knocking you into a pit. These are not hard in an interesting way. They are hard in an exhausting way.

The spark generator towers, which are meant to be each region's climax, have the same issue. You climb in one go while a surge chases you from below, burrowing into circuits to clear the way, and the horizontal movement is fiddly exactly when precision matters most. Get caught and you go back to the bottom.

And the ending does not land. The final region is the weakest in the game by a distance, arriving after most people will already feel the game should have wrapped up, and the final boss is a long, spongy fight that expects near-flawless execution. We finished it feeling relieved rather than triumphant, and that is the opposite of what this kind of game is supposed to do.