Minit is a curious little idea for an action adventure title (with clear Zelda influences) that manages to both successfully achieve what it wanted to do, and yet also be a slight disappointment.
The setup is simplistic – you pick up a cursed sword, get stuck in a timed loop and try to attempt to undo this, while having only 60 seconds to live before you die and respawn back at your home area. Everything (mostly) you pick up stays on you, some problems remain solved, but some must be approached again, taking precious time and prompting you to find quicker routes and smarter approach.
For the most part, this works really nicely. Especially in the opening hour (of about under 3 it will take you to finish it), where it’s always clear where you can go next, what you should do and how everything works. Yet, after a while, things start becoming annoying. I often found myself with lots of options of where to go and what to do, yet seemingly encountering only dead ends whatever I tried. Until you might stumble, most likely on accident, on some solution or “oh, this is what that was supposed to mean” moment and be able to progress. It doesn’t help that the charm of the game is skin deep, there’s no interesting story of any kind and finishing the game is your only motivation.
Especially since despite the cool premise, the game never feels particularly smart about using it. There are a couple of cool ideas based around the fact that you’re timed and that you will die and restart, but those are rare and most of the time you will play this just like any generic action adventure title. Not a particularly exciting one at that too. Which also can be buggy. In my case, it played fine (though, for some reason, it refused my any attempts to make screenshots), but there are reports of bizarre performance issues that make this visually simplistic game virtually unplayable.
If you get the game from some sort of bundle or on heavy discount, it’s definitely worth checking out. Some of its parts are nice and the basic concept is great and, sadly, underused in games. But otherwise, it’s more of a “yeah, it’s nice” type of game than anything I would recommend getting.