Mina the Hollower: $20, 93% Metacritic. Not a Fluke.

Yacht Club Games just proved Shovel Knight wasn't a fluke. And the rest of the industry should be paying attention.

The best rated game of 2026 costs $20 and was made by the same team that brought us Shovel Knight over a decade ago. Reviews for Mina the Hollower went live today. The game launches May 29. And the scores are not normal.

93% on Metacritic. 92% on OpenCritic. Critics are calling it a masterpiece. Push Square said it might be one of the best indie games in a long time. PC Gamer called it the Bloodborne, Zelda, Game Boy mashup nobody knew they wanted. One reviewer described it as a game "Nintendo would be too scared to make, FromSoft has already tried, and Konami gave up on for two decades."

And its twenty dollars.

It Looks Like Zelda. It Plays Like Something Else Entirely.

That's probably the most deceptive thing about Mina the Hollower. Mechanically and visually, the game is inspired by The Legend of Zelda, specifically Link's Game Boy adventures. At a screenshot glance, you would be forgiven for assuming this is a game about collecting items and abilities to solve puzzles, working your way through dungeons in that classic top down Zelda structure. The aesthetic screams it. The camera angle, the pixel art, the world layout, all of it reads as a love letter to Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons.

But the second you start playing, the loop reveals itself. Mina the Hollower is not about puzzles. It's about survival. The reward of progress here isn't a new gadget or a key to the next room. It's making it through brutally challenging combat sequences with your Bones, the game's experience currency, still intact. You burrow underground to checkpoint your progress and refill your health vials, then you surface and take on the next gauntlet. Die before you burrow and you lose your Bones. That tension between pushing forward for more and stopping to bank what you have is the heartbeat of the entire experience.

It's a retro RPG that hits all the right themes for nostalgia while improving and refining those systems for the modern day. The result is something that looks familiar but plays with a depth that most games in this space don't even attempt. Yacht Club didn't just recreate what worked in the '90s. They figured out what those games were missing and built it in.

Yacht Club Proving It Wasn't Lightning in a Bottle

This is the part that matters most to me from an industry perspective.

Shovel Knight came out in 2014. It was Kickstarter funded. It became one of the defining indie games of its generation. It got an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. It sold millions of copies. And then Yacht Club spent the next eight years making Shovel Knight expansions, spin offs, and DLC while people quietly wondered if they could ever do it again.

That question gets asked about a lot of studios. Can the team that made one incredible game make another? Or was it a right place, right time situation that can't be replicated? We've seen studios crumble under that pressure. We've seen them chase trends trying to stay relevant. Some of them scale up too fast, spend too much, hire too many people, and lose the thing that made them special in the first place.

Yacht Club didn't do any of that. They went quiet. They took four years. They made a game in a completely different genre than anything they've done before. And they came back with the highest rated game of 2026.

That's not luck. That's craft.

What $20 Buys You in 2026

I keep thinking about the contrast because the numbers are sitting right there and they're impossible to ignore.

Mina the Hollower. $20. 93% Metacritic. Made by a small team over four years with Kickstarter money.

Now go look at the AAA releases from the last six months. Games that cost $70. Games backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in development budgets and marketing campaigns. How many of them cracked 90? How many of them even cracked 85?

Expedition 33 did it for $50 with 30 developers. Windrose did it for $30 in early access. LEGO Batman did it at $70 but that's the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of full priced AAA releases this year have landed somewhere between forgettable and embarrassing. And here's a $20 game from a team that could probably fit in one office room outscoring all of them.

This is not an anomaly. I'm going to keep saying that until somebody listens. This is what happens when a studio makes a game they actually want to play instead of a game designed to satisfy a spreadsheet. There are no investor meetings deciding whether the burrowing mechanic tests well with 18 to 34 year old males. No focus groups telling them the gothic horror aesthetic might alienate casual audiences. No executive asking why there isn't a battle pass attached to the checkpoint system.

Just a team that loves old games and understands why they worked. People with the skill to rebuild those ideas with modern design sensibility. That's it.

The Soundtrack Deserves Its Own Paragraph

I wasn't going to break format for this but I can't help it. Jake Kaufman composed the Shovel Knight soundtrack, which is widely considered one of the best in indie gaming. The Mina the Hollower soundtrack reportedly matches or surpasses it. Multiple reviewers have singled it out as extraordinary. And Yuzo Koshiro, the legendary composer behind Streets of Rage and ActRaiser, contributed tracks as well.

Two composers. One of the best indie music directors working today and a genuine legend from the '90s. On a $20 game. And I guarantee the audio work here has more personality than most AAA soundtracks that cost ten times as much to produce.

Why This Launch Matters Right Now

Mina the Hollower drops on May 29. That's two days from now. It's landing right in the middle of one of the most crowded release windows this year. 007 First Light just came out today. LEGO Batman launched last week. Forza Horizon 6 is still fresh. Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core just dropped. The market is loud right now.

And a $20 top down action adventure with Game Boy aesthetics is about to walk into that room and potentially outscore every single one of them.

That says something. Not about marketing or brand recognition or installed user bases. It says something about what players actually respond to when a game is made with conviction. Because Mina the Hollower has no business competing with these releases on paper. It doesn't have the budget, the brand, or the platform push. What it has is a team that spent four years making sure every screen, every enemy, every boss, every weapon felt intentional.

Players can feel that. They always could. The industry just keeps pretending they can't.

The Bigger Picture

Yacht Club Games is now two for two. That matters. In an industry obsessed with scale, with headcount, with budget, with franchise IP, a small team just quietly proved that none of that is required to make something that critics and players love. You don't need 500 developers. You don't need a $200 million war chest. You don't need a cinematic trailer with a celebrity voiceover and a Super Bowl ad buy.

You need people who care about the thing they're making. You need time to get it right. And you need the discipline to not chase every trend that walks past your window.

Yacht Club understood that with Shovel Knight. They understood it again with Mina the Hollower. And if the industry was smart they would stop calling games like this anomalies and start calling them what they actually are.

The standard.

Mina the Hollower launches May 29 on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox, and both Nintendo Switch consoles. $19.99. Go give Yacht Club your money. They earned it.