By my count, I died at least 240 times before I got to the end of Minit, a quirky adventure game from publisher Devolver Digital. I didn’t lose my lives by dying against dastardly enemies or in brutally designed levels — but because of time itself. And all 200-plus of those minute-long lives, about four hours worth, add up to one of the most daring adventure games I’ve played in a long while.In Minit, a curse has befallen your little town, where a single day repeats on a 60-second loop. At the end of each minute, your character dies, and you wake up in bed, doomed to relive that same moment over and over again.The fleeting nature of your character’s life isn’t without meaning. Any progress you make in your minute of life carries over into the next loop. Additional checkpoints you discover become your new starting point, allowing you to dive deeper into the game. All this repetition begins to serve a purpose, whether that’s pushing yourself farther than last time or tackling a new, specific task.
Minit is a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time. Journey outside the comfort of your home to help unusual folk, uncover countless secrets, and overcome dangerous foes, all in hopes of lifting a rather unfortunate curse that ends each day after just one minute. Minit is a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time. Journey outside the comfort of your home to help unusual folk, uncover countless secrets, and overcome dangerous foes, all in hopes of lifting a rather unfortunate curse that ends each day after.
Each 60-second reset is an opportunity to meet a bizarre new character, find a new item or accomplish a goal. Over time, the main storyline even begins to reveal itself, turning Minit into a true hero’s journey. Exploring a hidden dungeon in the depths of the desert JW, Kitty, Jukio, and Dom/Devolver DigitalThat story is told brilliantly through a simplistic, 1-bit art style that belies a much more complex experience.
Because there’s no time to waste in Minit, there’s little opportunity to stop and admiring the scenery — from lakeside hotels, vast deserts or polluted rivers. Instead, the stripped-down visuals serve a purpose. The art style trims the fat so the game’s core idea can be amplified: How much can you pack into 60 seconds?It’s a magical concept, one that’s like a sped-up cross between Majora’s Mask and Groundhog Day. Because of the high-pressure time constraint, simple tasks, like helping someone find the right radio station or locating a lost wallet, became monumental challenges, because they were all that I could manage to do before the curse whisked me away. There’s a silly rush of adrenaline that seeps into every action, because the moment a new life starts, I have to make a mad dash toward a goal, even if it’s as trivial as buying a new pair of sneakers.The time loop not only creates tension, but also intrigue. Normally in adventure games, you can stop to inspect curiosities, like tentacles hidden across the map or the possibility of a ghostly oasis hidden in a desert.
In Minit, the mystery behind these oddities only grows as you keep encountering them in passing — like while you’re on the way to water a plant or kill some crabs. There’s never enough time to investigate what they are. Instead, they sit in your head, your curiosity growing until you drop every and decide to devote a handful of lives to figuring out their purpose.My entire time spent with Minit felt like a wild rush, as each new area explored or item received sent my mind racing about how the game would be affected. While every life lasted about half as long as it takes to cook a Hot Pocket, they were each worth all 60 seconds I spent on them.Minit will be available on Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on April 3.