Minit

It's cute, it's functional, it has a retro shtick that *mostly* works, there are a couple funny moments, the music is nice and the nonsense dialogue samples are charming. That said, the extent to which it actually realizes its titular 60-second gimmick is fairly minimal. Yes, the game was designed around it and yes, it means that there are areas designed such that you can't complete them in the given time limit until you come back later with some new item, but in that respect it's quite cut-and-dry from start to finish (which, for me, was about 2.5 hours). It never particularly surprised me, there weren't any real laugh-out-loud moments, and the only real challenge factor was just constantly trying to figure out where to go next without much clear direction. Compare this to, say, Half-Minute Hero, which actually makes very smart use of its gimmick and relies on circumventing it, has considerably more playtime and offers some hidden branching paths, and the idea has just plain been done better before. I'd consider this worth the playthrough at maybe HALF its starting price.

Game runs way too fast in fullscreen and the devs have been ignoring this issue for months. There is absolutely no support for an otherwise interesting game. But no support, no respect.

Really short game, beautiful graphics, not particularly difficult or anything remarkable in my opinion. The 60 seconds limitation mostly meant that I spent most of the time running back and forth for no particular reason. On Linux build needs libcrypto 1.0.0 so good luck with that! Running the Windows build on Linux using innoextract 1.8 worked without problems.

A puzzle/adventure game where you explore a 2-D world, solving puzzles, collecting items, etc. Like Zelda but this is a lot less combat heavy; there are only a few required fights. The gimmick of the game is that you play it in one-minute bursts; the sword you’re carrying is cursed, and will kill you after that amount of time. When you die, you respawn at the nearest house you rested at, but you keep found items, quests stay solved, etc. It could be interesting or frustrating, but really it ends up being not much of anything. There are enough houses and shortcuts, and the game-world is small enough, that you never can lose much progress or get frustrated. At the same time, the game doesn’t do much of anything with its core mechanic; there aren’t puzzles where you have to find the quickest way of doing something, or clever challenges built around it. It’s just sort of … there. Which isn’t to say it’s bad. The game-play loop may basically be Zelda, but there’s a reason that Zelda’s been around for as long as it has, and the game pulls it off well. The graphics don’t look great in the screenshots but work fine in practice (and for the record, the reason that game’s star rating is so low at the time I’m writing this is that a bunch of forum posters saw the screenshots and gave it low ratings without ever actually playing it), the puzzles are fairly simple but solid enough to be rewarding, the music’s good, and the world is well-designed (and as I said, designed in such a way that playing it in a one-minute loop isn’t frustrating). Its only real weakness is its short length, clocking in at about two hours; it probably would have been better to have redesigned it so that the optional side-quests were moved into the main game to extend its length. There is a NG+ mode where stuff is changed around, so you could double that to four hours if you wanted, but again, I think it would have been preferable to use the time that went into NG+ to extend the main game.