Under the Island by Slime King Games is more than a loveletter to The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. It brings so many of its own ideas to the table that it could well have been a Nintendo-made GBA Zelda itself.
Imagine: It is Christmas 2004. You are unpacking a brand new copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, probably the most beautiful game Nintendo has ever released on the GameBoy Advance, and slot it into your trusty Advance SP. Over the course of the next twelve to twenty play hours, several of which are probably happening right there on Christmas Eve, you are going to save Hyrule by finding four magical artifacts. You’ll use innovative weapons and tools that the Zelda series has never seen before, find interconnected mini-dungeons that open more and more new areas in the game’s central town and play loads of minigames for new heart containers, bigger purses and more.
Now open your eyes and find yourself in February 2026. Incredibly, you are able to experience a game much like the described, because Slime King Games, the rather freshly founded studio by former Daedalic leads Johannes and Simone Grünewald (read our portrait here), have released Under the Island, a game that can easily be described as a love letter to Minish Cap and anything that makes the classic 2D Zelda games great.
In Under the Island, grumpy teenager Nia moves to Seashell Island, a magical place in the ocean that quickly turns out to be a floating arch of an ancient civilisation when Nia ignores local customs and touches a forbidden shrine. The ark is sinking, and to save it, Nia has to find four cogs hidden all over the world. To do that, she will have control over the legendary weapon of this ancient civilisation, except… someone was there before, nicked the sword from the chest, and left her with a hockey stick. Oh well, that’ll do.
Much like in a Zelda game (and in Minish Cap, specifically), Nia goes around, cuts grass, collects money and heart pieces, which are called heart coins here, and becomes gradually stronger with each new tool she finds in a dungeon. The dungeons themselves are framed nicely. Most often they are not ancient ruins that somehow noone ever entered, but either contemporary structures which employ the use of the cog somehow, or ancient, but still used facilities like a crumbling water treatment plant. The tools themselves are special as well: Nia won’t employ boomerangs, bows or a bag of fire seeds to go around. Instead, she finds treats that will move animals around the world to help her with puzzles, and a bird that she can send out to collect items and pull switches. Animals are at the heart and center of the game, because apart from them being used in most puzzles, there are also several interaction methods centered around livestock that define the world around Nia. Bushed in dungeons seldom drop hearts for Nia to heal, instead she has to feed mice since they will always drop a heart for her when they are happy. Buffalos can be lured to pressure plates, goats can ram honeycombs from trees, and dogs can be hired as temporary fighting buddies. Finding more interactions with the animals of the island is as integral to the exploration and to getting more and more rewards as is finding hidden stairs into interconnected little caves, mostly centered around the islands main town. Nods to beloved mechanics in Zelda titles like a game-wide exchange quests, mini-games like coconut golfing and of course, bombing open walls show that developer Slime King Games really injected a whole lot of love for the genre and its predecessors into Under the Island. The main story takes about six to eight hours to complete, but the island leaves much more space for exploration and puzzles – there’s even a little Nonogram dungeon hidden in the game, utilising one of the story’s latest findable tools.
Under the Island releases on 17 February 2026 for Steam, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
A charming love letter to GBA Zeldas, with plenty of its own special ideas that breathe fresh wind into 2D adventure games.
