Mina the Hollower scores 91 Metacritic, Yacht Club’s best-reviewed game yet

Mina the Hollower has done more than land well. It has given Yacht Club Games the kind of early validation that can change how a studio is seen, with Metacritic listing the PC version at a 91 Metascore based on 59 critic reviews and the Nintendo Switch 2 version at 90 from 19 reviews. That put the game at the front of the year’s review conversation and made it Yacht Club’s best-reviewed release yet.

The acclaim has clustered around the same pieces that made the project stand out long before launch: a Game Boy and Game Boy Color-inspired look, open-ended exploration, flexible difficulty options, and spritework and sound design that critics have treated as more than nostalgia bait. Mina the Hollower stars Mina, a renowned Hollower sent to rescue a cursed island, and the gameplay mixes burrowing beneath hazards and monsters with whipping foes, sidearms, and trinkets. It is the sort of setup that feels immediately legible to older players while still offering enough mechanical texture to pull in new ones.

That matters because Mina the Hollower is not just another Shovel Knight follow-up. Yacht Club said the game had been in development for more than six years and called it the studio’s most ambitious game ever, with a massive interconnected world spanning dozens of regions and more total screens than Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. The project began as a side project by Yacht Club employee Alec Faulkner, then grew into a Kickstarter success that later reporting said raised more than $1.2 million. Sean Velasco once described it as a “make-or-break” release for the studio, and that pressure is now colliding with the strongest possible critical reaction.

The game launched May 29 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2, with Yacht Club also pricing the PC version at $19.99 on Steam, GOG, and Humble Store. For Yacht Club, the big shift is no longer whether the studio can make one breakout hit. Mina the Hollower is convincing critics that the team’s next identity is real, and that the audience built on Shovel Knight can follow it into something new.