Minute Of Islands
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Aworld on the brink of collapse, where an airborne threat is having a devastating effect, while people protect themselves with face coverings – apart from one who believes that they alone can fix the problem. No, we didn’t expect Minute Of Islands to be such a stark reflection of the past 18 months, either, but this narrative-led puzzle-platformer manages to burrow beneath its charming comic-book stylings to unearth unsettling imagery and quietly upsetting scenes.
Young mechanic Mo is tasked with maintaining ancient machines that keep a toxic fungal spore at bay from her archipelago home. When they all break down at once, she embarks on a desperate journey to fix them. But coming to the surface also means running into family members – encounters that trigger old resentments. These aren’t apparent from Mo’s stoic expression, but her thoughts are conveyed by Megan Gay’s excellent narration, which flits between a fairytale cadence and a more biting tone. It complements Minute Of Islands’ Belgian-comics aesthetic that at first appears family-friendly until the sight of a whale carcass, intestines spilled all over the shore, tells you otherwise.
A LONG TIME ARCHIPELAGO
The islands you visit are almost all places Mo is familiar with. Objects therefore yield not just observations but instances where you’re prompted to ‘remember’ each island and its inhabitants. They’re essentially narrative collectibles, designed to encourage more thorough exploration for completionists. However, the game’s linear nature means that once you move on from one island, there’s no opportunity to return – except by starting another playthrough.
Yet while Studio Fizbin’s game serves up some striking visuals that will linger in the memory – often the grotesque kind we’d rather didn’t stick – it’s also often too introspective for its own good. That leaves much of its world a stubborn enigma, such as how there even came to be four giants keeping the cogs of the island’s machines turning while imprisoned underground in the first place. Mechanically speaking, it offers the bare minimum, too. Mo’s special Omni Switch is supposed to be an all-purpose tool for solving puzzles, so it’s disappointing to discover that it essentially amounts to a compass, and that puzzles where you insert it like a lever into a machine before directing an energy current to kickstart another are broadly the same. Occasionally, Mo’s reckless journey through the toxic spores leads to some more hallucinatory sequences, but the platforming elements here are also rudimentary and repetitive.
Nonetheless, Mo’s quest is an intriguing examination of what it means to be a young chosen hero given the burden of saving the world in utterly hopeless circumstances. However, it’s also a reminder that there are no quick fixes, nor should one person bear this responsibility alone. While Minute Of Islands lays this message on rather thickly towards the end, and suffers from rote mechanics, it’s an all-too timely (big) mood piece.