Right on time.
Okay, we've got to do this quick.
How quick, you might ask? An excellent question. We only have a minute. That's the fulcrum for everything in Minit, to be precise. One minute from start to finish, to try and make a little progress and set yourself up for the next run.
So what's the actual premise to lead to this? Why, it's simple. Your poor sad little dude starts the game without this time limit. ...And then the first thing you do is pick up a cursed sword that kills you in sixty seconds and it all goes to shit.
Every time you come back to life, a good chunk of your progress holds. The big stuff. But all the little things reset. It's kind of like a compressed Majora's Mask, except that reset a lot more than this does. (We're going to come back to that comparison)
And that immediately builds us a model. Every step forward is on the clock. You can only get so far in a puzzle, but you've got to get far enough to get something you can keep, whether it's an item or a new state. It creates a tight, dense little sandbox of a situation.
Perhaps your biggest tool is the...I guess you could call it the home system? Basically there are a series of houses that act as spawn points. So a significant chunk of the play loop is about getting far enough into what could be called a questline to get to a new useful house so you can lock down your spawn, dying, and then figuring out what problems you can solve there and if they open up any new situations at one of the other houses.
Oh, and the whole thing plays like a simplified, compressed down 2D Zelda. One item and relevant button instead of two or three, basic movement, plus a suicide button. It's even further simplified down to a crisp pure black and white, just those two extremes with no greyscale.
Hell, if you took out the core minute-long-life gimmick, you'd have a game that feels like it chopped off half a Gameboy just to make a point.
But of course, you have that minute-long-life gimmick, and it influences everything else about the game. Things have to be short. Dungeon-style challenges are just one little puzzle in a room or two. You're usually just solving one or two little problems for people in their quests. The whole thing makes the vintage games it's based on feel positively leisurely.
Not that that's a bad thing. When you get into a rhythm in Minit, you just tear through and make progress like nothing I've ever had before in a game. The whole thing's boiled a more typical game syrup down into such an intense concentrate that we're passing into candy stages.
Deep-cut cooking science jokes. That's where I'm at in this stage of my life, people.
Anyways. It's a really interesting little game, a bit too small to have tons to talk about. SO let's jump into the flaws.
Well, I had a bug where the sound just plain stopped working until I quit the thing and started it back up. That's one.
And some of the puzzles can be a little counter-intuitive.
But, honestly...This game knows what it is, and it executes on that really well. It's small, it's humble, and it explores a central gimmick in a familiar framework really solidly.
So yeah, go on and get it, and see what yo--
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