Mina the Hollower is a Zelda-inspired retro adventure from Yacht Club Games
Taking inspiration from the Game Boy Legend of Zelda games, the project's Kickstarter campaign has already been funded.
Get your whipping arm ready: Yacht Club Games, the indie studio behind the beloved Shovel Knight, recently announced its next retro-nostalgic title. The game, Mina the Hollower, is a top-down action-adventure game taking heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda. In particular, the Game Boy Zelda games like Link’s Adventure and the Oracle duology are an obvious influence.
First announced at Yacht Club Games Presents 2022, we got our first look at the game and couldn’t be more excited for it. The gameplay looks incredibly fun, and it also has the same care to emulating that retro feeling that Shovel Knight has.
While Yacht Club is fronting most of the development cost, the studio also launched a Kickstarter campaign for fans to show their support. Within 12 hours, backers met the initial goal of $311,503 USD (the same amount raised for Shovel Knight‘s Kickstarter).
See the reveal trailer below, courtesy of Yacht Club Games on YouTube:
Everything we know about Mina the Hollower
Mina the Hollower is a love letter to 8-bit top-down adventure games like The Legend of Zelda. You play as a mouse named Mina, a Hollower who sets off on a quest to vanquish beastly creatures. Armed with her trusty whip, Mina can attack enemies from far away as well as burrow underground to avoid attacks and hazards. You’ll also have a number of items at your disposal, each granting Mina a new ability for traversal or combat.
The graphics are also a deliberate tribute to the Game Boy Color’s visuals. Everything from the game resolution to the color palettes are accurate to the console. But with a widescreen display and 60 glorious frames per second, it still looks amazing in action.
Yacht Club Games’ official description for the game reads as such:
Descend into a frightful world of action-adventure in Mina the Hollower. Take control of Mina, a renowned Hollower hurtled into a desperate mission to rescue a cursed island. Burrow beneath hazards and monsters, whip foes into oblivion, and gear up with an arsenal of sidearms and trinkets. Explore a vast world filled with pixel-perfect graphics, masterful gameplay, beastly bosses, and infectious music. Encounter a cast of bizarre characters, search out secrets in an array of exotic locales, and illuminate the omnipresent darkness in Mina the Hollower, a brand new game from the developers who brought you Shovel Knight!
Mina the Hollower Steam description
The Kickstarter campaign and beyond
Fans already smashed Yacht Club Games’ Kickstarter goal, with the campaign fully funded within half a day. Reward tiers include assisting Yacht Club on collaborating with the developers on certain game assets, an exclusive backer enamel pin, and a Mina plush. Yacht Club later announced two stretch goals: a sound test and cheat codes; it looks like more will be announced as the campaign continues.
In other news, an update for Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon is on the way with accessibility features and bug fixes. A new online V.S. mode, mod support, and additional characters are also arriving soon. Yacht Club also announced that the upcoming Shovel Knight Dig has entered the final stages of development and is nearly complete. See the full Yacht Club Presents stream here.
Mina the Hollower is developed and published by Yacht Club Games. The game is expected to launch on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam. No release date is known yet, and the list of consoles is not final.
Via Yacht Club Games.
