Minit (Switch eShop) Review

After playing a lot of 20-40 plus hour games lately, it’s nice to see that there’s at least one game that’s over within a minute. If only it was that simple! I’ll need a few more minutes to go into it.

Minit is an ambitious adventure game, where your little duck-billed creature finds a cursed sword that kills them in one minute. If the whole thing was over then it would be a quick game. But you’re resurrected again or time is rewound (I’m not sure which) at a safe house, and the 60 seconds start again. Enemies respawn but generally items you collect and progress gating puzzles stay solved. The main goal is to get these items to bring you closer to finding a way out of the curse. There is a factory you’re told to go to early on, but mostly you’re left to your own devices, coming across characters that will lead to mini-quests to get the next item.

If it looks like you’re not going to have enough time, you can hit the B button which instantly kills you to get you back to the start of the timer quicker. Initially, there were a few embarrassing moments of hitting the death button instead of the sword button and dying in the middle of a fight. Fortunately, when you do die, you’re never too far from where you were. You’ll become quite familiar with the little world as you’ll be running back and forth a fair bit. As you collect more items, the more you’ll be able to go back to those familiar locations and interact with them differently. This will get you more items, allowing you to progress further still.

Minit is a top-down, adventure pixel game with a dash of combat. The world is monochromatic which can look a bit bare, but the game makes the most of it. It’s not an enormous world, so most of the locations are there for a reason. Accompanying it is a chiptune soundtrack which I really liked. It sounded like I was on an adventure, but not one I could take my time on. You’ll be hearing the tunes a lot due to the repeated dying, so it’s a good thing they sound pretty nice.

The game works best when you know what you need to accomplish, and it’s just a case of completing the steps to make it work. Things become less fun when you’re left in a series of runs unsure where to go next. The game rewards exploration and trying everything to push ahead. But there’s also plenty it just doesn’t decide to share with you, as you hurt your head against a puzzle making the most of the minute to make any kind of progress. The game is minimalist in general and that’s part of its charm, but I wish it could’ve given a bit of a nudge in the right direction at times. I hit a point in the game where I needed a way to hit enemies from a distance. Given some enemies had a bow and arrow, I figured at some point I might find a bow too. Little did I know I needed to find an enemy that would give me that ability when I killed them. The enemy was way out of the way, and there’s no reason to expect they’d give me that ability. It’s possible one of the NPCs say something and I didn’t see it, but it was one puzzle that seemingly had no rhyme or reason to it. Overall it’s a minor issue, usually, as you explore further you’ll find what you need to do next.

Minit took me about an hour and a half to finish, even with plenty of stumbling around. But that’s only the first playthrough. There is a New Game + as well as more once you’ve braved that. The New Game + gives a much greater challenge from the start, with a 40-second timer instead of the minute, one heart only, and some things have been moved around to throw you off. I played a bit of this mode and just the 40-second timer change alone makes it a whole different experience.

If you’re looking for a neat little game that does a lot with the little it gives you to work with, Minit is a fun fast paced game. If you love old school top down adventures looking like they were made for the Gameboy, then this could be for you. In a world where games can take so many hours, it’s nice to have a short and sweet game like Minit that is fun to play.