Minimal Move

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Minimal Move is a Family-Friendly Puzzle-Platformer released on PC in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game has players controlling a pair of alien investigators exploring a strange section of space with altered states of gravity.

For a $7 budget game, Minimal Move has a surprisingly good presentation, with bright, colorful, slightly-cartoony 3D visuals with a fair amount of personality to them. These are backed by a quiet, almost dreamy soundtrack that doesn’t quite seem to fit the game, but at the very least isn’t distracting.

The gameplay itself isn’t revolutionary, but it’s novel enough to be fairly unique within the genre. Players control two characters, who can both freely walk around the blocky floating structures in each of the game’s levels.One of your characters, Ido, can interact with blocks that have left-right or up-down arrows, moving the blocks in the indicated directions. Your other character, Kaiten, can move blocks with a circular arrow, rotating those blocks in the indicated direction. Using these different abilities, you must move each of these characters to the level’s exit (or exits, in levels where both characters must head to separate spots).

This, combined with some pretty good level design, makes for some clever puzzles to solve throughout the game’s levels, and players looking for more of a challenge can try to complete these levels with as few moves of the aforementioned interactive blocks as possible, which is undoubtedly where this game’s title comes from.

There is one major flaw here, though. Due to the gravity-warping nature of the game, your controls can get messed-up when you find yourself on the side or bottom of a block, and it’s not intuitive which way you’ll be rotating rotation blocks when you press in a direction. This made for numerous unnecessary deaths as I thought I would be moving one direction when in fact I went the opposite way, and sometimes simply navigating a character to where you want them to be can be a real pain when you have to move them all around the oddly-shaped levels.

Still, while there are definitely some frustrating control issues here, for the most part Minimal Move is a solid Puzzle-Platformer with a good gimmick, and fans of the genre should definitely give it a look.

tl;dr – Minimal Move is a Family-Friendly Puzzle-Platformer where players controlling a pair of alien investigators exploring a strange section of space with altered states of gravity, with players using one character to move blocks left-right or up-down, and the other character to rotate them. These mechanics make for some good gameplay thanks to solid level design, though this is hampered somewhat thanks to controls that do a poor job adapting to the changes in gravity you’ll be dealing with frequently. Still, for Puzzle-Platformer fans, this is well worth checking out.

Grade: B-

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