Minit’s obvious inspirations are the 2D Zelda games, but what it actually reminds me of most is Half-Minute Hero on the PSP, a game with a similar premise but applied to a JRPG rather than a Zelda-style adventure and with an even shorter time limit. Minit demands you memorize where everything is and the fastest way to get there, and it’s refreshing to see a game that trusts the player to figure everything out themselves, even if some of the puzzles here showed a bit too much trust in that regard. Minit’s real downfall is that while it is a very charming game with a neat premise, it isn’t much more than that. There isn’t much going on here, and having to traverse the same areas over and over again when most of them don’t have anything worth seeing got a bit tiring, even considering the game’s breezy length. After beating it, I couldn’t help but feel that Minit was a bit of a hollow experience.

This is another "why not" Game Pass game, and that sorta ended up how I felt about it at the end. I saw the last half of this game played on a livestream maaaany months ago, probably around the time it came out, and was always mildly interested, but nearly enough to pay real muns for it. I'm pretty glad I held out, at this point, because while Minit is neat, the kind of experience it offers isn't something I think I'll get as much mileage out of as a similarly short game like Blazing Chrome. It took me like 50 minutes to beat, and that's knowing nothing about the first half of the game.

Minit is the story of a little blob thing who one day finds a sword on the beach but it's CURSED, and will kill you in one minute! Your goal is to break the curse in a series of minute-long runs where you die at the end and respawn at your home. You can find other homes to respawn in as well as teleporters linking them as you go through the game, but the world map is still fairly small. The most limiting factor is obviously the minute-long death countdown. It's a simple adventure game with very little combat (although there is some) and is more about enjoying the quirky characters in the world and solving puzzles than any kind of action.

There's quite a fair bit of hidden stuff to find in the game, and even though I was looking, I only found 63% of it, according to the end-game counter, so you could theoretically spend a fair bit of time replaying or just straight up playing the game looking for all the secret coins and heart containers lying around. There's also a challenge mode you unlock when you beat the game once that makes it so you only have FORTY seconds instead of sixty, which I have to imagine makes the game a fair bit harder, but that wasn't something I was really interested in.

The presentation is fine, but nothing to write home about. It's a charming monochrome pixelated style with fairly minimal use of music. The game runs and controls fine on the Xbone, not that I'd have any reason to assume it isn't. The writing is minimalistic, as you can't exactly spend much time talking to people when you only have 60 seconds to live, and characters will even auto-talk to you just by walking up to them. Amusingly enough, you can actually stab every character in the game, and they'll all react in some way as well, which is fun. There's a very lighthearted way to the way the game is written though. My favorite is when there's a guy who talks realllllly slowly, and you basically need to spend your entire "life" listening to them talk so you can hear the secret they say at the end XD

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Minit isn't a bad game, but it's a very particular kind of game. It's a very particular kind of game that you may well enjoy well enough, but I think relatively few people are going to enjoy Minit enough to feel justified paying the $10 it goes for on the Switch eShop (for example). If you have kids who are just getting into games, this would be something great to play together, or if you're really into adventure games and want something a little bit different you will probably quite enjoy Minit. With everything that $10 can buy you, I think Minit doesn't do quite enough to stand out from the indie crowd. Personally, I'm glad I got it effectively for free through Game Pass, because I did not feel that I got $10 worth of enjoyment out of Minit despite relatively enjoying the time I did spend with it.