Minit

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Minit is a Top-Down Action-RPG where the player takes the role of a character who finds a cursed sword. From that point on, the player is doomed to die every 60 seconds. As such, players must make efficient use of their time and get as much as possible done within the span of a minute.

Given how quickly the player must work to accomplish tasks in this game, the presentation here is understandably simple, with pixel art visuals in plain black and white. Unfortunately, these visuals can be a bit too plain in areas – without any detail to distinguish areas from one another, a lot of them can seem very samey. Thankfully, the sound here fares somewhat better, with some pretty good chiptune music to go with the simplistic visuals.

The gameplay here is of course all built around its clever central conceit, with players challenged to make whatever progress they can in 60-second increments. Thankfully, players retain any items retained, quests completed, and so on when they die, with the main change being that they are forced back to the last living quarters they walked into (their house, a hotel room, and so on). And there are some clever ways the game uses this too, such as having one challenge be a character who speaks particularly slowly, meaning players have to rush to speak to him to hear the end of what he says, or an area that’s too vast to walk across, requiring speed boots to get past.

It’s that last element that actually makes up one of my main complaints regarding the game – players are actively discouraged from exploring in numerous ways in Minit, not the least of which is the central premise itself – dawdle even a little, and you’ll have wasted what little time you have. However, this is exacerbated by numerous areas where there’s not really anything to do, nothing to distinguish it from other areas, and it makes the necessary exploration you have to do feel like a thankless chore. And that is of course beyond the fact that the game’s central premise is, by design, a huge annoyance.

I do at least give Minit credit for originality – this is a pretty unique concept, and one it does a good job of exploiting in interesting ways. It’s just unfortunate that this concept feels like it runs directly counter to a core element of the Action-RPG genre, exploration. And this is made worse by the lack of variety in the environment, which itself is made worse by a featureless monochrome visual presentation. As a result, this clever premise is made unnecessarily frustrating multiple times over, and while I can certainly recommend it to those looking for something unique and original, for most I’d argue this game is probably more trouble than it’s worth.

tl;dr – Minit takes a Zelda-style Top-Down Action-RPG and adds a twist that the player dies every sixty seconds, forcing them to make as much progress as possible between those deaths. It’s a clever concept, but it runs counter to the genre’s core element of exploration, a problem made worse through multiple frustrating design choices. It’s still worth a look if you want to try something unique within the genre, but for most it’ll be too frustrating to want to stick with.

Grade: C+

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