Mina the Hollower Tops Metacritic's 2026 List With 92, Beating Forza and Resident Evil

Yacht Club Games' Mina the Hollower is now the highest-rated game of 2026 on Metacritic, sitting at 92 after briefly holding a 93 earlier in its review cycle. That puts the Game Boy-styled indie action RPG above Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, and Pokémon Pokopia in the year's critical rankings.

For a studio whose last release was Shovel Knight in 2014, that's not a bad way to end a twelve-year gap. Mina launched May 29 after a delay last October, and the reviews landed hard enough to push it past the year's biggest AAA names. Forza Horizon 6, Playground Games' reliable critical darling, didn't catch it. Neither did Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem, which shipped back in February and has had months to accumulate scores.

The disputed part is which Metacritic number you cite. The game opened higher and has settled at 92 as more reviews trickled in — still enough to top the 2026 chart, but worth noting if you're the kind of person who screenshots aggregator pages. OpenCritic and Metacritic don't always agree on what counts as "top," and a clean cross-aggregator comparison isn't yet available. The headline holds either way.

Developer reaction has been about what you'd expect from a studio that just spent half a decade on a passion project and watched it land. "What a way to wake up," Yacht Club's Sean Velasco said of the response. Velasco also set his own commercial bar publicly: "If we don't sell a million copies, I'm going to be disappointed." Early Steam numbers reportedly sit around 55,000, though that figure comes from a single unverified source and Yacht Club hasn't confirmed sales.

Designer Nick Wozniak pushed back on the easy nostalgia read in interviews around launch. "We never did anything for Mina solely to satisfy nostalgia," he said, pointing to the post-delay rework where the team "really stepped back and took in the game as a whole." David D'Angelo, meanwhile, admitted the team leaned into letting players get lost on purpose — something he conceded "feels weird" to call an intended experience.

The GOTY conversation is the obvious next stop. An indie topping the year on Metacritic doesn't automatically translate to awards-show wins — The Game Awards voters have their own arithmetic, and there's still half a year of releases to go. But Mina is now the benchmark every fall release has to clear on the scoreboard. Whether it stays at the top through December is the only real question left.