Here’s how to play Mina the Hollower on Android, no game streaming needed

Mina the Hollower is one of the hottest new games in 2026, coming from the same team behind the popular Shovel Knight franchise. The title is available on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and computers. There’s no official mobile port, but you can still run the game on your Android phone if you don’t have a console or PC. And we’re not talking about game streaming.

GameNative, GameHub, and Winlator are the three most popular PC gaming apps on Android, letting you run PC titles locally on your smartphone or tablet. The former is the most intuitive app right now, so we’ve used it to run Mina the Hollower. Here’s how.

GameNative supports games from your Steam library, GOG, Epic, Amazon, and local game files. I bought the game via the Steam app on my phone, but you can also opt for GOG if you want a DRM-free version. Nevertheless, once you buy the game on either platform, you should see it listed in your Steam or GOG library on GameNative.

You then need to tap on the Mina the Hollower listing in GameNative and hit the “install” button. The following screen will confirm the game’s download size (~745MB) and size on disk (~842MB), as well as your device’s available space. Simply tap the “install” button on this screen to begin the download and installation process.

If you’ve got the GOG version installed on your PC, you can copy the install folder to your phone. I recommend creating a “PC” or “games” folder in your Downloads folder and copying the game’s folder into this directory. From here, open GameNative and tap the “plus” icon to select the game’s folder. Once it’s been added to your library, you might have to choose the proper .exe file that’s launched when you hit the “play” button. So tap the “edit container” button, then tap the “Executable Path” dropdown menu and make sure “MinaTheHollower.exe” is chosen. I’d still recommend installing the game directly from your Steam or GOG library in GameNative, as this is a more seamless process.

In any event, the best thing about GameNative is that it automatically applies known configurations for each game, and Mina the Hollower is no exception. This theoretically means you’re getting the optimal configuration without having to make endless tweaks first.

As for the actual gameplay experience? My brief hands-on time showed that the game ran incredibly smoothly on my Galaxy S25 Ultra loan unit. Temperatures were generally in the low 30s (Celsius), which is pretty cool for a PC game workload. The 2D nature of the game likely means the silicon isn’t being pushed to its limit. This is also encouraging for long-term play sessions, where high temperatures can lead to throttling and degraded performance.

In saying so, some people with Mali-powered devices have reported major issues with the game. More specifically, these users found that the game doesn’t work or simply crashes. I tried the game on a vivo X300 Pro, running the flagship Dimensity 9500 processor, and it didn’t work out of the box. That’s mainly because the default configuration uses an open-source Turnip driver, which only works with Qualcomm chips. I also tried the wrapper/system driver/VKD3D and Wrapper-leegao/system driver/DXVK config combos, which yielded a critical DirectX12 “video adapter” error. Colleague Stephen Schenck also experienced the same error when trying the game on his Pixel 7, which has an Arm Mali GPU.

There is one other solution if you really want to run Mina the Hollower on your Android device without game streaming. You can use the Eden emulator to run the Switch version. However, this is a considerably more involved process than GameNative, as you need to source the game ROM, the console’s firmware, and Nintendo’s digital keys. These requirements also make it ethically dubious if you’re not dumping these files from your own Switch.

I’m sure many people would love to see a native port of Mina the Hollower on Android, but I’m glad the PC version runs just fine via PC gaming apps. Well, if you have a Snapdragon-powered device anyway. So our fingers are crossed that Pixel owners and people with MediaTek-powered devices can get in on the action soon.