malvasia bianca

I’m behind on my blogging, unfortunately: I normally try to have no more than one game finished and unblogged, but right now I have four. So I can’t quite remember what I had to say about Minit; fortunately, I didn’t have a ton to say about it, so that’s not the worst thing.

It was a pleasant way to spend some time? It’s working in a good genre, adding in a good hook to that, executing well on both of those aspects, and not overstaying its welcome.

I guess the thing that struck me the most beyond the basic idea was how I was responding to it emotionally. Most of the time, the time limit was fine: mildly frustrating, but only very mildly. Because there was always something to do next after you died: so the bad news is that you died every minute, but the good news is that you almost always had an idea of what to do after that. And, as a corollary: the game is constantly giving you little wins, because by its very nature there’s always going to be some little success you can reach in 30-45 seconds, and while I didn’t actually make tangible progress every lifetime during my playthrough, I did maybe ever third or even every second lifetime, which is a very pleasant drip of accomplishments.

The downside is when you get a little stuck. When that happens, you just want to be able to spend a little bit more time exploring and tugging on threads; so having to start over every minute makes that harder and more annoying. And, more subtly, it actively works against deeper / more creative thought: it keeps you (or at least kept me) in a more surface level of hypothesis generation. Not that there are deep puzzles to solve in Minit or anything, but, as is the nature of puzzles, sometimes one of them will randomly take longer for you to hit on a solution.

But the loops aren’t anywhere near as bad as in Outer Wilds: having to spend 30 seconds to get back to where you were just isn’t that bad. And I only really got stuck once; and, fortunately, just as I was starting to get really frustrated with that, Ariel wandered by and had a useful idea. (Which makes me curious if this would be a good game for two people to play together; it was certainly useful in that situation, but then the flip side is that, with the time pressure, it might be annoying to have to deal with suggestions from somebody else about what to do next, if you’re already a little on edge then you might not have mental bandwidth to think about what somebody else is saying? Dunno.)

Anyways, good game, pleasant way to spend three hours or so.