Good, albeit short, adventure
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.