The short, but incredibly enjoyable, Minit has been released for all major mobile platforms. The game has been available for $4.99 on the Apple and Google Play stores since last Thursday (June 27th as of this writing). Be sure to check it out if you’re a fan of Zelda-like adventure titles.
Minit is an indie-adventure game, first released in Spring of last year. The game largely revolves around a single gimmick—players only get sixty seconds per life. Of course, certain items and actions carry over. In many ways, Minit is a clone of early, first-generation Legend of Zelda games: it has puzzles, a sword-wielding main character who collects tools that grant new abilities, tiny sprite characters, and collectible hearts. But Minit‘s time limits offer a fresh take on the classic genre.
The story is pretty simple. When the unnamed main character walks outside on the first day of the game, they find their house conveniently blocked off by small, impassable bushes. The kind that can only be cut down by a sword. (Sound familiar Zelda fans?) The only thing the character can interact with is a sword laying down by the beach—but when the player picks it up, a small sixty-second countdown appears on the screen. Apparently, the sword is cursed.
Every sixty seconds, the player dies and returns home. In order to beat the game, our hero needs to find the source of the curse and remove it.
The fun gimmick really opens up a whole new world of opportunity for the tried-and-true genre. Minit really leaves you feeling nostalgic without relying too much on redundant tropes commonly overused in adventure games.
One of the best parts of the game is its replayability. The game has three separate modes: New Game, New Game+, and Mary’s Mode. New Game mode is just the standard game. New Game+ is the standard game, but more difficult and with all of the item locations switched around.
Mary’s Mode switches the main character into an in-game NPC ghost named Mary, which takes away the sixty-second countdown clock for people who want to try and speed-run the game. Mary’s Mode is only accessible for those with a 100% completion rate on New Game mode. Beyond the extra modes, the game has tons of collectibles available for completionists.
Although the game is rather short (around two hours generally), the replayability makes it a great addition to any game library. And now that Minit is available for iOS and Android, fans and newcomers can give it a go, one minute at a time, from anywhere they want.
