Chances are you ve caught wind of Minit between its initial release and the clamor for a Switch port. It s a wee, wonderful, one-bit adventure where, thanks to a cursed blade, you die every 60 seconds. While it s a romping hoot of a game, it also blatantly wastes your time. I mean that in a good way: Minit tosses away precious seconds with so many fun, sincere, and clever tactics that this shines as a pro, not a con. (more…)
Time limits are a much maligned bit of game design. A single level with a race against time is fine, Halo's final warthog run or Call of Duty Modern Warfare's desperate fight through a nuclear silo. But turn that into a whole game? People still argue over The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Dead Rising. The creeping pressure is quite the stress, and finding a balance that still pays off people's potentially lengthy investment should they fail to meet certain actions in time is evidently not easy. Minit's solution is right there in the name and it's magic.
Minit has a time limit, at the end of which you will die and lose your progress through the game's world. Some things are kept but you'll be starting from the last bed you slept in. What makes it work? You're only sent back a mere minute in time. That sharp focus and tiny scale turns the time limit from just an obstacle and into a way to actively encourage the player. 60 seconds isn't much to lose and so instead of a frustration, it's a prompt to do things better, quicker and smarter next time. It pushes you to really engage with the world because, when every second counts, you've got to find every shortcut, every exploit and get very good at taking out or avoiding enemies. That self-imposed limit means the designers have to fill every space, every single screen with things to do as players will return again and again. Density over vastness.
This mechanic highlights so many of the problems in other game worlds, especially open worlds. Some games are so big, and yet we engage with such a small percentage of their space in a meaningful way. When time isn't an obstacle, why not have miles and miles of samey fields? "More is better" is such a common characteristic of big budget titles and the result is big spaces, filled with repetitive content and scarcely anything memorable. Our interactions with so many gaming worlds is passive. Even when they're pretty enough to make us stop and snap a screenshot we're still not learning them or unravelling them. They just want to get us to the next item on a checklist.
“So we kind of said this is a one time thing. We’re all coming together to work on this one project.”
That sentiment is very much the spirit of Minit itself. The adventure game where you’re stuck in a loop and each life lasts sixty seconds is all about doing as much as you can in the time given to you. It’s a magic gem of a game, small and focused. A playthrough will probably only last a few hours but every minute of it will stick with you.
For developers Jan Willem Nijman and Kitty Calis, it was an opportunity to get away from larger projects and do something completely different. Though Minit started out quite differently from the game we have now, with a game jam back in 2012 where Cartoon Network put the Adventure Time IP in the hands of creators. (more…)
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 will die. End of.
This kind of pressure is, admittedly, horrifying. A one minute deadline for everything? 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?
Minit gives you sixty seconds to achieve great things. As soon as you wake, in whichever place you’re currently calling home, a timer begins to countdown and when a minute has expired, you die and restart. In that time, you might find a useful item, which will be close at hand in the next life, or you might discover a new area and start to formulate a plan for exploration and infiltration a few lives down the line.
It was during my second life that I found the lighthouse. By the lighthouse, an old man stands, crooked of spine. He tells you everything you need to know about Minit’s wit and central conceit, and he does that with nothing more than a text box and a very clever monologue.
Minit is that most rare of joyful things: A really good idea, done really well.
In Minit you play a little bird-like pixel character who lives in a black and white pixel world, and is cursed with only ever living for a single minute. And yet despite this limitation, it presents a little RPG. HOW?! you ask, in your belligerent way. Hush, I shall tell you. (more…)
Minit has the monochrome pixel art of Game Boy, but its concept sounds like something newer - a bitesize adventure played out in minute-long servings.
The indie project - the work of four people - revealed itself last night with a trailer and a release date for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
It's due to launch in a couple of weeks on 3rd April, for the price of 6.99. Here's how it looks: