You have to push an energy block into a socket to power up the giant, for example. In the giants’ lairs, effectively the dungeons of Minute of Islands, they occasionally threaten to offer puzzles. The problem is that Minute of Islands keeps skirting on the edges of more intensive, involved gameplay, but chickens out at the last minute. We’ve got nothing against a lack of interaction – we’re huge fans of walking simulators and visual novels – and we believe that games don’t always have to be a Call of Duty or Forza. The game – what you actually do in Minute of Islands – also can’t sustain the four hours of play. They don’t lose their lustre, to be fair, but they can’t sustain a game. It leaves a saggy middle where the repetition of the game’s core structure – travel to an island, activate the purifier, find the giant, activate the giant – becomes exposed, and you’re really only left with the beauty of the islands. Exposition comes at the end, and meaningful interactions are mostly at the start. Its storytelling is perhaps a little too sparse, and the pace of information and interactions with characters is a little off. The story’s not completely successful, however. It may be slightly too on-the-nose, but the adage of every person being an island is never more true than in Minute of Islands. The quiet, the lack of information, the few characters in the game: they all emphasise Mo’s loneliness, and you feel the weight of the world on your back. It’s also an incredibly lonely game, and dives into themes of duty, carrying other people, and being the hero when no one wants you to be one. The detached narration and the lack of character voices means that you never quite get to know Mo, what it feels like to have her burden, and it makes her actions in the last act more surprising and heartrending. What’s great about Minute of Islands, and what makes it so audacious (especially when you consider that Studio Fizbin are mostly only known for The Inner World point and click series) is that it mostly works, when it really shouldn’t. The ending – which we definitely won’t give away – takes a huge left-turn from what is accepted or correct about satisfying endings. Exposition is only given in the last act, in a colossal information dump, long after you stopped asking questions. Character interactions are extremely thin on the ground, and everything gets filtered through the narration, rather than hearing them talk. It’s never truly clear if this is an omniscient narrator, a long-dead character or a kind of detached inner monologue, but it definitely aims a raspberry at the whole ‘show don’t tell’ wisdom. It does the Bastion thing of having very little dialogue, but slathering narration over the top whenever it can. Minute of Islands breaks virtually every narrative design rule that you can imagine. You’re also responsible for four giants who sit below the surface of the islands, turning pistons that keep the islands and the purifiers powered. These spores trigger madness and then Clicker-like mushroom protrusions on the body, before a horrible death. It’s your job to maintain the purifiers on the islands, removing fungal spores from the air. You’re the only one who has this device, and you’re clearly relied on. In Minute of Islands you play Mo (pronounced ‘Maw’), a young girl who is the custodian of the ‘Omni-device’, a staff-like thing that can activate alien machinery on an archipelago of islands. It’s a cartoon Goya painting.Įnough gushing. The remarkable detail in the environment means you pick out a new rotten corpse or fungal explosion each time you pass by. The ambient soundtrack makes each island lonely and ramshackle, bursting into occasional life. It’s across the presentational board, too: hulking creatures creak and moan with lumbering animations. We can’t understate this enough: purely in terms of the world that’s been crafted here, and the sheer panache it’s been done with, Minute of Islands is worth playing.
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