Day -1 — why we're building this

The launch is tomorrow.

Mina the Hollower will be the most-Googled indie title of the week. Yacht Club’s first new IP since Shovel Knight. Metacritic 93. Best-rated game of 2026 so far, one point ahead of Forza Horizon 6.

We checked what existed.

• wiki.gg/Tenebrous_Isle — 35 entries. No map. Mostly stubs.
• r/MinaTheHollower — doesn’t exist.
• 23 reviewers wrote great pieces. None of them updates.
• The official site sells the game. It doesn’t help you play it.

There is no companion site for this game.

We’re going to build one before the SERP solidifies.

What ships in 12 hours

Phase 0 — Launch Companion. The MVP we promised ourselves we’d ship before noon Pacific tomorrow.

• A bestiary — every enemy and boss sprite GIF from the official press kit. 24 enemies and bosses, plus Mina’s 7 moves underneath. Each one gets a single page with the GIF, the region, what one reviewer said about it, and a status badge that reads “How to beat coming D+3” until we’ve actually fought the thing.
• A reviews page — 23 outlets, average score 93, displayed as a single huge number in pixel font. Each row links to the original review.
• A diary — this entry, then one more tomorrow morning called “Day 0 — site launches at noon, going in blind.”
• Placeholder pages for /trinkets, /bosses, /map, /builds so Google has somewhere to land while we play through and fill them in.

What ships in the next two weeks

• D+3: Ossex region map (Leaflet + CRS.Simple, screenshot stitching from our own playthrough).
• D+7: Trinket DB at 60+, all boss mode tables filled.
• D+14: Build Lab. Drag-and-drop weapon + sidearm + 5 trinkets, URL-encoded so you can share a build without a login.

What this is not

Not official. Not affiliated with Yacht Club Games. Mina the Hollower™ is their trademark, used here with credit. Zero ads. Zero affiliate links. The repo is open. Pull requests welcome from D+3 onward.

Why now

The SERP for new game releases solidifies in the first week. Wikipedia owns “what is”, Metacritic owns “score”, the review outlets own “review”, and the official store owns the brand query. What’s left — the long tail of “how to beat X”, “where is Y trinket”, “best build for Z boss” — is genuinely up for grabs for the next seven days.

After that, every late entrant is fighting for backlinks against a site that’s already there.

So we’re going to be the site that’s already there.

Tomorrow at noon Pacific, we launch.

— Mina the Hollower Companion team

Written 2026-05-28 D-1, before any of us has played the game.