Minit review – a bite-sized marvel
Just the idea of Minit is enough to make me squirm.
It’s the time limit that does it; an ever-marching expiry date that’s impervious to pleads or procrastination, a silent but ever-present threat that’ll see you fall to the ground and die every sixty seconds, over and over again. There are no secret ways to expand or pervert it – no clever tricks to hide from it. Every minute, without fail, you die. End of.
MinitDeveloper: JW, Kitty, Jukio, and DomPublisher: DevolverPlatform: Reviewed on PS4Availability: Out now on PS4, Xbox One and PC
This kind of pressure is, admittedly, horrifying. A one minute deadline for ? A lifespan that expires in a single minute? I’ve wasted more time than that just reorganising an inventory – how on earth am I supposed to finish an entire game?
60 seconds isn’t long, but it’s surprising how quickly you’ll adapt to Minit’s constraints, and how much you can get done once its short loop imprints this strange, charming world on the inside of your head. So if Minit’s very conceit is enough to unsettle you, you owe it to yourself to give it a chance; before long you’ll become accustomed to the short bursts of activity, and you’ll realise that even though death slams down every minute, you’re no longer scared of it – and that’s curiously liberating.
Though it presents itself as a top-down Zelda-esque action RPG, the core of Minit is a competent little puzzler. Yes, its story unfolds via contrived 8-bit presentation, complete with the plinky-plunky music of the era, and yes, there’s been a lot of this lately; games crafted to artificially appeal to nostalgia, evoking memories of sitting cross-legged on the living room rug as you/your father/mother/brother/sister/friend darted, usually lost, around Hyrule. But while there’s a lot of that baked into Minit’s design, to its credit it feels more like a sincere homage than a cynical device designed only to tap into your childhood – not to mention a cunning way of hiding its greatest secrets in plain sight, too.
