The actual biggest game of October, the Shovel Knight devs' Zelda-like Mina the Hollower, gets delayed as devs say it's "so close to being done"

The September Silksong Stampede has come and gone, but indies are still trying to escape a crowded October – though this time, it seems the delay is completely unrelated to the stacked release calendar. Yacht Club Games is delaying its upcoming tribute to Castlevania and Game Boy Zelda, Mina the Hollower, for an unspecified (but seemingly not very long) bit of extra work.

"This week, our team made a tough decision: we decided to delay Mina the Hollower," the devs say in their announcement, appropriately titled Delay Extravaganza II: The Tail Continues. "The entire crew has been working tirelessly day and night to finish development for release on Oct 31st, but we''re just not quite there yet. This isn't a major delay, it's just a stretch of time to apply some final polish and balancing to make the game truly shine."

"We don't want to announce another release date until it's submitted to platforms, so please hang tight as we reach the finish line," Yacht Club says. The studio apologizes to fans in the message, but adds that "we will not waver on our commitment to quality." To that end, they're working on "finalizing design, art, and sound," "overall game balancing," "implementing localization," and, er, "eating cheese." Well, at least the studio's sense of humor is intact.

Yacht Club is best known for the Shovel Knight series, and Mina the Hollower is a similar tribute to classics of consoles gone by – though this one is a top-down action-adventure with some serious aesthetic similarities to classic Game Boy Zelda titles like Link's Awakening. Add a bit of Castlevania-style Gothic horror and varied subweapons, and Mina has looked like a promising follow-up from the start.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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