"TRUE FINAL RELEASE DATE!! 🐭 🙌 Mina the Hollower launches May 29 for only $19.99! Prepare yourself for one of the greatest top-down adventures ever to be delivered directly to your soul for less than 20 bucks. Mark your calendars. Tell your friends. Wishlist now"

Confirmed just over a week ago, Yacht Club Games has ended the silence on the indefinite delay that Mina the Hollower received back in October. At the time, Yacht Club cited delaying the game for:

  • Finalizing design, art, and sound,
  • Overall game balancing
  • Implementing localization
  • Eating cheese
  • Testing, testing, testing… on all platforms!

Seven months feels like a long time finalization and polish, but I've never made a game before. I hope it is a question I can ask the team some day. When you factor in the kickstarter launched four years ago, it's been quite the journey.

I played a piece of the demo when it came to Switch 2: I even put the game on a CRT for the "authentic" feel. The game feel at the time was that juiced up game movement with the digging and popping up. The combat was snappy. The aesthetic was everything you'd want it to be. I did feel like the menus and systems were overbearing. It felt like a lot the grasp in the heat of a demo. I hope the onboarding is smoother in the final game.

Since the release date announcement, Yacht Club has put up a couple of videos on socials detailing game design decisions. One is about platforming precision and the other is about not including a nitty gritty map in the game. The platforming one in particular reminds me a lot of the disciplines in Celeste that Mark Brown talks about in his video.

There are just two weeks to go. Here's to the team and the game—it seems like a lot is riding on this little mouse.