Mina the Hollower preview: Yacht Club's Zelda homage deepens

A few years ago at GDC I played an early Mina the Hollower demo and came away frustrated: clumsy controls, opaque objectives and punishing difficulty made it feel like nostalgia run thin. This year’s demo on Nintendo Switch 2, guided by a Yacht Club developer, felt like a different game.

After 20 minutes I found it polished, purposeful and poised to grip players much the way Shovel Knight did. On the surface it’s unmistakably inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening — a top-down world built from chunky pixels, with dungeons to discover and clear.

The twist is that you play as a mouse who can burrow into surfaces and move underground for short stretches. That ability serves as a core tool: activating checkpoints, slipping under gates and dodging foes. The world is non-linear, letting you tackle main dungeons in any order, and Yacht Club says the game will likely run between 20 and 30 hours, with a number of optional bosses to find.

mina, hollower, yacht club, zelda, link's awakening, nintendo switch, burrow mechanic, top-down, dungeons, shovel knight