Price: 2 bucks
Time: 5 days

As always it was the colours and casual look that attracted me to this switch game. Although I've nevers seen Adventure Time the artstyle reminded me of it. When the game opened with an adult themes warning and ominous sounds and visuals, i was truly wondering what way this story was gonna go.

As i expected, gorgeous visuals. Early issue: i hate realistic jump height. This girl literally jumps maybe 30cm off the ground, that's below realistic height. What i do like is that the collectibles actually add something to the story.

This game has some incredible skies, something I've always adored. The core of this game is movement which doesn't feel too great on the switch. A lot of backtracking and puzzles feel slow, as they're also movement based.

Although the cartoonish artstyle and the adult themes, both in writing and in visuals, are a great match, i cannot finish this game in one go as I usually would. It's simply too much of the same after 2 giants, i have to play something else inbetween. The game however doesn't easily allow this. Because of the backtracking you can easily get truly lost in a cave if you haven't played in a while.

The gameplay is really quite repetitive, the intrique of the story and the gorgeous art keeps me going. I must admit though, the Crypt is so damn beautiful i can't imagine it getting any prettier, and i still have 2/4 giants to go, which feels like a chore.

It actually went by quite quickly, which is good. The ending leaves you with a lot of questions though that i wish would've been answered. Overall a decent game if you enjoy colourful artwork.

living like WWE, get the belt put it on me
u gotta be kidding yourself if u think i’m giving up easy

i’m not sure what i had expected from minute of islands. i guess that may have been why it stayed on my wishlist for so long until a friend of mine graciously gifted it to me for christmas
the art is what pulled me in, like how could it not?
a beautiful arrangement of colour and giants. and you. and the weight of the world.
the almost 6 hours i spent playing, no matter how slow i was moving or the times the game stops you to say “hey, take a look” i felt like i was almost done. i felt like i was GOING and i was going to achieve my goal any second now, any minute

everyone saying the puzzles aren't great are right. but they're largely inoffensive and won't get in your way too much. i'm clumsy at all platforming and i did ok. if you don't like the art and if you don't like exploring you won't like this game. while they don't force you to go out of your way ever, they will ask you to walk back to the beginning of an area in order to leave to the next zone. it didn't bother me but i know it would bother some people. similar to a small-scale Hob you make a few shortcuts and you'll get out just fine

yeah I used to have friends. yeah i used to roll deep
til I ruined my health, ain’t been getting no sleep
i got sick of myself, i got sick of these dreams
getting bigger my eyes start hallucinating

you play as a young apprentice named mo who is stubborn and bratty and refuses to let anyone get in her way. she will do the right thing, the right way, on her own. always on her own
the land you all called home is decaying, the air is thick and noxious and you're getting sick. you'll run into family of yours who stayed behind (for you) while the rest of civilization fled. there is no time to sit with your uncle for a glass of homemade wine, no time to join your sister for a pot of stew.
mo will work with the giants, mo will help them power their machines and mo will cleanse the air again. there is no other way. if you stop you fail
if you stop it's all your fault
and then your grandmother asks for a favour and you get the chance to reflect

CURSING OUT FUCK THE WORLD IN EVERY LANGUAGE NOW WHO FEELIN JADED? I AM. I CHANGED INTO SOMEONE I CANT FIX

the final act of this game is definitely where it all starts to come together for me and mean something. i didn't like mo, but i think that's the point. i didn't like how slow the game wanted me to move and the way it would stop me as i finished single pieces of puzzles that i already thought had taken me too long. but again, i think that's the point. it's all against you, it's all against mo and there can only be so much time. you can't save the world, it's not going to wait
there are things bigger than you and you can run from your fear for only so long. SO long that there are people close to you ready to mourn you at any moment because you're always fucking running
but it's bigger than you, it's huge, it's tremendous, it's giant

play it or don't. but i can say that after wanting to play it for 4 years or something, i'm glad i did even if i probably won't be playing it again

yeah i did it all me

i want to rate this higher because it has such a cool setting and lore, and is stunning with bright, vibrant cartoon art depicting such bleak and eerie landscapes. it makes for an amazing setup, but the execution is sadly just awkward.

this is a 3-hour game stretched out to double that time because everything is slow. running is slow. crawling in and out of tunnels is slow. watching your boat dock and undock is slow. every single unnecessary camera pan is slow. finding the exact right spot you have to jump to get to the next edge and then watching mo slowly float back down because you missed is slow. i played when i was tired and sometimes i'd keep the joystick pressed left for a minute while i rested my eyes because i knew nothing would happen in those sixty seconds. you get the idea. oh, and that long climb you took to reach this peak? if you were wondering if you have to take the long way back down—yes, of course you do.

i normally have a lot of patience but this bothered even me. you know how hayao miyazaki said that stories need ma, like downtime in between story beats, time to breathe and observe the scenery? this game is like 80% ma forced upon you, broken up by 20% actual content.

i think if this had been a point-and-click game, i'd've forgiven it, because calling it a puzzle platformer is... generous. there aren't many puzzles and the platforming is mediocre. its meat lies in its story, not in the many platforms that exist just to make you press jump a few more times. if it had been advertised as a narrative adventure or maybe reworked as a walking sim, it'd have excelled, because the gameplay mostly consists of walking around slowly just to finally, finally press a button. and i like those games, but i don't consider them puzzle platformers.

am i irritated that this game made me play through a dozen hallucination scenes just because the main character won't wear a fucking mask while walking through several poisonous clouds of gas? yeah, maybe.

Es un juego que se toma su tiempo. Los paseos son lentos, el tiempo en el barco también, el dar marcha atrás en una isla que no volverás a ver... Pero no creo que sea especialmente doloroso si sabes a lo que vas.

Con respecto a las mecánicas, tiene un pelín de plataformeo, pero nada que suponga reto alguno, asi como algun que otro puzzle sencillito. Es un juego que busca meterte en su historia de un mundo devastado y tu como la persona que quizás pueda arreglarlo, pues es tu trabajo, reparar cosas rotas. O al menos lo intentas a costa de lo que sea.

Tirando al final hace cosas con la historia que me gustan mucho, y otras bastante manidas en el género de videojuego indie que he visto a otros hacer mejor, así que me ha dejado un sabor agridulce. No malo, agridulce, creo que cambiando 3 cositas habría sido un final mucho más redondo.

Esa estética que mezcla Adventure Time con cosillas que podrían recordar a Scorn años antes de que este saliese le queda como un guante a esos escenarios llenísimos de detalles por todos sitios. Te los crees completamente y también te crees que la gente no tuvo tiempo de recoger sus cosas.

En general me parece un buen juego si buscas algo casi puramente narrativo, para estar de chill sin complicarte la vida y ver muchos paneos a fondos asombrosos.

A beautiful game about anxiety, trauma, family, loss, and moving on. The art has a lovely if occasionally grotesque style to it that was always exciting to see what the game would show me next. The writing was moving and struck a good balance of leaving things for you to fill in some blanks but also being blatant and telling you what you need to hear when you need to hear it. It never once felt like it was clumsy or being too mysterious and I really appreciate that.

The platforming is pretty simple but I think that serves the game's goals well. The puzzle solving is similarly simple but, once again, I think that's for the best. If either of those aspects were too difficult it would just make the game a slog to get through and no one would want that.

It does drag a bit in the middle but for a game that's only five hours long what that amounts to is a 30-ish minute section in the middle somewhere that should've been 15 or 20 so overall that's a pretty minor complaint.

I love Mo and I want her to be happy.

Il gameplay, notevolmente scarno, è del tutto sacrificato alla narrazione e alla veste grafica del gioco (che su stessa ammissione degli sviluppatori trae ispirazione dalle tavole di Trondheim - per certe isole e fondali in esterno in particolare, Hergé, Mœbius - per le sezioni oniriche, e dei Kerascoët - per l'uso dei colori e per il design dei personaggi). Il platforming è ridotto all'osso e banalizzato anche dall'uso dello stesso cue visivo (della sbroda) per ogni piattaforma su cui ci si può arrampicare, l'esplorazione è inesistente dato che ogni mappa è estremamente lineare e il giocatore non viene gratificato con la scoperta di qualcosa di nuovo o anche solo parzialmente nascosto. Non sarebbe assolutamente un problema, se la narrazione valesse l'intera esperienza. Così non è, penso. La storia è comunque interessante, trattando un breve racconto a tema fantastico in cui molta attenzione è dedicata alla biografia della protagonista (in ogni sezione è possibile collezionare dozzine di ricordi legati a un particolare ambiente o un particolare oggetto) e alle sue relazioni con gli altri personaggi presenti (sue amicizie e suoi parenti). Purtroppo, le potenzialità del medium non sono quasi mai sfruttate dagli sviluppatori: l'unica occasione colta è quella di accedere a determinati ricordi e di ricostruire individualmente la biografia della protagonista. Allo stesso tempo, questi stessi ricordi sono tutti facilmente accessibili e quasi nessuno di essi è realizzato in maniera tale da rendere ogni possibile ricostruzione differente da quella di un'altra persona: anche qui, la scoperta non è gratifacata né presente, e l'esperienza dei giocatori e tra giocatori sarà sempre identica. banalmente, il racconto così presentato sarebbe forse risultato più interessante sotto forma di fumetto o cortometraggio animato.

In più, quelle fonti luminose da evitare per far sì che i pochi e monotoni puzzle presenti non vengano resettati sono più o meno come le occasioni di platforming in Doom al di fuori delle battaglie: inutili rotture di cazzo elementari che non aggiungono nulla all'esperienza di gioco.

Minute of Islands has a lot of weird issues. The platforming is totally unnecessary and awkward; the narrator talks way too much especially at the beginning; the game constantly breaks its own flow with slow panning shots, cutscenes where nothing happens and so, so many loading screens; and there are even out-of-place and half-baked stealth puzzles.

All that being said though, I can't dislike this game at all. The art is too good, the world is too interesting and the story being told is too deep and relatable. Minute of Islands would most likely have been better as a simple point-and-click adventure game, but what it is is still fantastic and I loved it.

Basically Adventure Time if it were more focused on its apocalyptic aspects, needless to say it was cool for that alone

And the story is pretty interesting, there’s no voice acting for the characters but the narrator of the story does a good job conveying its progressively bleaker tone. That said I wish there was a bit more to the gameplay itself since you’re mostly doing the same monotonous actions multiple times, with occasional platforming and a fair bit of tedious backtracking. It’s only a 5 hour game but it somehow still felt a bit dragged out

I played this game on a whim because I loved the desolate looking hand drawn style that feels reminiscent of Adventure Time (which is always a good thing in my book). I was also pleasantly surprised by a very well articulated narration that really feels like a dense children's book world.

These amazing core features are also undercut by its simplistic puzzles and sluggish platforming capabilities. I found myself dreading backtracking with your character's miserable run speed (on the other hand this is consistent with your character's miserable relationships with your only kin in the area).

I'd love to see what this game studio does next because this game leads me to believe that the devs could do so much more.