Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games is at a “make-or-break” moment in the studio’s history, and needs Mina the Hollower to do well.
Mina the Hollower is a game I have had my eye on since I started at Eurogamer. In fact, I think its announcement was one of the very first articles I wrote for the site. In a first for the company, Mina the Hollower has nothing to do with Shovel Knight. Rather, this time players will have the chance to take on the mantle of adorable but feisty mouse Mina as she sets out to save a cursed island from the perils that have befallen it.
The game features a top-down adventure style reminiscent of Game Boy Zelda game Link’s Awakening in a gothic, Castlevania-esque world. And, a lot rides on its success when it comes out next year.
As detailed in a new report by Bloomberg (paywalled), in the time since Shovel Knight, Yacht Club divided its team in two (with one team set to work on an unannounced 3D version of Shovel Knight which it had “been fantasizing about for years”, and one to work on the “less ambitious” Mina the Hollower). Yacht Club also moved into a new office in Los Angeles. However, then the pandemic hit in 2020, and Yacht Club like the rest of us had to adjust to a different way of doing things.
Work on Mina the Hollower didn’t progress as quickly as the studio had hoped, and in 2024, Yacht Club acknowledged that the two-team structure wasn’t working, and after laying off some staff and cutting back on other expenses, merged back into one team. The studio’s focus was now solely on Mina the Hollower, and work on the Shovel Knight sequel was paused. The project also had a change in leadership, with studio founder Sean Velasco taking over as director from Mina the Hollower’s Alec Faulkner, who is said to have clashed with some of his team.
And now, it is “make-or-break for sure,” Velasco has admitted. “If we sold 500,000 copies, then we would be golden,” he said of Mina the Hollower. “If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great.”
However, if the studio only sells around 100,000 copies of Mina the Hollower, “that’s not so good”. The studio founder did say that if Mina the Hollower were to “flop”, then Yacht Club Games would still exist, but it would require some kind of cash injection fast. The studio is already taking steps to keep the studio afloat, and will be moving to fully remote at the end of the year. It will also be shifting its attention to only working on one project at a time.
“What we’re doing in the future is try to figure out ways to have a game come out every couple of years, instead of every five or six,” said Nick Wozniak, another Yacht Club founder.
“We haven’t released a game in so long.”
Mina the Hollower was intended to debut on 31st October, but was pushed back without a new release date earlier this year. At this time, Yacht Club stated it wasn’t “a major delay” but just “a stretch of time to apply some final polish and balancing to make the game truly shine”.
I played the demo for Mina the Hollower on Switch 2 earlier this year, and loved it. “I collected Bonestone, I popped off various goblins and bats, I burrowed my way underneath enemies to spring up excitingly from behind and I negotiated perilous pits, all while bopping along to a gloriously retro-infused soundtrack… Oh yes, I am certainly looking forward to Mina the Hollower’s full release,” I wrote back in August. This feeling hasn’t changed.
