Created by Yacht Club Games and the long-awaited new IP following Shovel Knight, Mina the Holloweris a potent blend of Game Boy Color-era classics with signature Soulslike gameplay aspects.
Despite its clear inspirations, it carves a path of its own as a strong GOTY candidate and the best-reviewed game of 2026 thus far.
Although the Yacht Club Games team has been busy with the title's successful launch, we were able to catch Nick Wozniak, the team's Pixel Artmancer, for an interview. Thanks for your time Nick!
The Interview
Mobalytics: How did you balance nostalgia‑driven design with modern standards and expectations?
Nick Wozniak: Well, we never did anything for Mina solely to satisfy nostalgia. Instead, we took elements we loved from many different eras of gaming and put them through the lens of a Game Boy Color game. Our goal was to create a holistically enjoyable experience that doesn't require having played Link's Awakening on original hardware to appreciate. That said, if you did grow up with it (as many of us did), you might recognize and enjoy the evolution of the genre we're hoping to present.
Mobalytics: What’s one mechanic in the game that was way harder to implement than players will ever realize?
Nick Wozniak: We spent a lot of time on the overall balance of the game. It took many playthroughs and custom-built tools written specifically for balancing. One of the big things we did after the delay last October was really step back and take in the game as a whole, making sure we followed through on our promise of creating a game you could play through in any direction while also ensuring there were no weird difficulty spikes.
Mobalytics: What was the weirdest bug you encountered, the kind that made the whole team stop and laugh?
Nick Wozniak: At one point, one of the scarecrows that is supposed to spawn after you talk to them had some trigger messed up so that it would spawn constantly. We are talking like thousands of enemies crammed in a small section of the screen. That bit of level became completely impassable and unplayable. You could try to get in there and smash around and get a bunch of money before dying but it would eventually crash the game so…
Mobalytics: What's a lesson you learned from Shovel Knight that applied to Mina? What's something you learned from Mina you'd apply to future games?
Nick Wozniak: One of the key lessons we took from Shovel Knight was to establish clear rules early on regarding art restrictions. Setting that foundation allowed us to really define what the art style would become. We took that to heart with Mina by using a restrictive palette to keep the game feeling cohesive. For Mina, a lot of the lessons we learned were very specific to the genre. Working on a top-down game means you need lots of directional animations for pretty much everything. But we learned early on that certain enemies don't need full up, down, left, and right directions to still feel dynamic and cool—especially some of the bigger enemies. One late-game enemy, the Congealed, crawls all over the ground in every direction, but it only has one facing direction. As a player, you might not even notice it, but for us, it saved a huge amount of time in art development.
Mobalytics: The speedrun records for Shovel Knight are around the 40-minute range. What would you predict would be the record for Mina a year from now?
Nick Wozniak: During our early internal testing before the game was public, we had a couple of speedrunners give it a try. Based on that, my baseline expectation is that an hour and twenty minutes will be the time to beat. Their 100% clear was around four hours. Knowing how these things usually go, I'm sure that time will get crushed way beyond expectations, but we're here for it!
Mobalytics: If Shovel Knight is your MarioMegaman and Mina is your Zelda, what's inspiring your next game?
Nick Wozniak: We could really take that in so many different directions. We're going to move forward with whatever we see as the most exciting and interesting thing for us to pursue. With Shovel Knight and now Mina, we've shown that we like to take gameplay, aesthetics, and designs from the past and modernize them. And we're not stopping there! We're going to keep finding new ways to honor the games we love while pushing the DNA of what makes us love those games into the modern age.
Mobalytics: If Mina were represented in Smash Bros or another fighting game, what would you want included in her moveset?
Nick Wozniak: In Smash?! Oh man, she has so much potential with all her weapons and sidearms. I'd love to see a down-Smash with the Blastrike Maul that spikes opponents into the ground which would pair perfectly with her burrowing mechanic. Maybe rapid strikes with the daggers for zone control and quick combos, but her neutral game has to be the Nightstar. Its reach is just too good and hey, maybe we could sneak the wiggle upgrade in there too.
I'm picturing this: smash them into the ground, hollow through them to pop them up, follow up with a couple dagger strikes from Whisper and Vesper, then finish them off with a big blast from the Battery Bat. She might not be much of a jumper, but on the ground? She'd be an absolute menace.
