Minute of Islands (Thoughts)

Much like the comics that its style draws upon, Minute of Islands is best experienced only a little bit every day. Game director Anjin Anhut said the first half in a 2019 interview with Gaming Bolt, that “[Art Director Tim Gaedke’s] art direction is mostly inspired by French and Franco-Belgian comic books.” The connection is obvious: a brightly drawn child, Mo, is gifted a techno-magical artifact, the Omni-Switch, and the sole responsibility of preserving her whale carcass infested island chain’s technology that keeps deadly spores away. The adventure of a child with clearly too much personal responsibility is the core of Tintin and the non-place, underexplained atmosphere of Moebius fits in Minute of Islands as well as in the aesthetically similar Scavenger’s Reign. The second half of the first sentence, however, is implied by the absence of what Anhut claimed would be “the player constantly discover[ing] new functions of the Omni Switch.” Because Minute of Islands is less a leap from Studio Fizbin’s prior work with the point-and-click Inner World games than the transition fossil of an unrealized species. This would end up not being true by the time the game released in 2021, but I think that makes it a great case study in the way art and animation can (and cannot) redeem minimalist game design.

The gameplay loop is itself simplistic platforming (no fail states; at its most complicated you clamber up to pull a lever or push a box, sometimes dodging objects that reset progress, before walking back) with equally simple puzzles (arguably there’s only one  puzzle that’s not Simon Says — spinning three wheels to make their images correspond to images in the environment). In between there are towers that the player has to activate in order to later wake up the game’s sleeping giants, both actions requiring the same button inputs: Hold S to take out the Omni Switch, Press F to stick it into a slot, tap F to crank, walk to a revealed glowing platform and hold S and D, then move a small orb around to a sphere and tap F to power up the giant/tower. Everything in the game has been mechanically explained, and if that sounded extremely detailed and, yet, extremely uneventful, that’s a good summation of the game itself. But to be clear — that’s not bad by itself! Art is full of nothing happening in great detail: Seinfeld, Mrs. Dalloway, The Stanley Parable. Even the above-mentioned Moebius’ landscapes are uneventful in the most literal sense — contrasts between visual density, endless-seeming vistas, and vibrant gradients.

But several negative reviews on Steam mention that the game “doesn’t respect the player’s time.” The creation of such a game arguably implies a desire for the player’s time to be spent in a positive way, but the frustration (which I also felt when playing!) clearly stems from somewhere. Here I’d ask and answer what does it mean to respect a player’s time? You can extend this question out from “player,” but to sit with the player for a minute — I feel respected, when playing a game, when a proportion of the agency I surrender to the game is rewarded with feedback. Maybe the most infamous example of surrendering agency for no reward is crawlspaces. In older games like Uncharted these would appear in almost every level — and have become a lingua franca of AAA design — but in turn varied the game’s pacing, making it feel dynamic, include fun dialogue, show unique animations, and hide loading screens. In a way they were a diegetic cutscene. They’re infamous now particularly because they’ve become standard parlance without the utility. Skeuomorphs, you can’t even suspend disbelief. They are simply genre. Which brings me to the most frustrating example in Minute of Islands

The player doesn’t have a lot of room to wander, but what wandering room there is rewards you with Mo’s memories. Typically these require pressing F on an object and catching a ghostly organism hovering overhead. I have problems with this in game as uninterested in platforming as this, but that’s nitpicking. What I really want to go into is the tunnels. In the giant’s underground bases there are off-to-the-side rooms the player can crawl into to catch a memory. The animation cycle has Mo lean into the tunnel, pausing before crawling through, leaning out of the tunnel to check the floor, exiting, dusting herself off, before finally retracting her hands and giving the player control again. This takes 12 seconds (which must be repeated to leave the room) and is rewarded with 5 or so lines of nonspecific narration in a deeply specific room:

The brothers may be old,

But they are not immortal.

And neither are you.

What will be left of you when you are gone?

Only dust and crumbling bones.

This is in the first base of the game and, let’s be honest, it’s a gorgeous room. A little unclear how or why it’s gathered this way, how it relates to either Mo, or the race of the giants, but it’s certainly evocative. A bone shrine inside a giant’s skull is metal. But couldn’t the narration have happened if Mo had stood in a lightless room? It doesn’t clarify the space’s story, really. It’s abstractedly existential. Without specificity to this space, why would it stay in the mind any more than if you’d scrolled past it on Twitter? Without any of this — the reward — what good was the half minute I spent watching an animation that I know I’ll be forced to watch half a dozen times by the time I beat the game?

By contrast, later in the game there’s a sweet moment where you’re at Mo’s sister’s chicken-filled island homestead. If you go all the way to the right, a somewhat viewless beach off the beaten path, you’ll find a chicken in a short watchtower. If you climb up it the chicken flies away, and after chasing it a few steps it flees to the coop to reveal a memory: “Fridolin will escape again, but he just needs his own space. Mo can sympathize with that.” Unlike the tunnels, it doesn’t pretend interactivity. Once you get Fridolin off the tower, there’s no alternative to following him back. And unlike the tunnel room in Safan’s base, he looks like all the other assets of his kind. But Fridolin’s memory is sticky not only because it gives a little character to the world and Mo, but also because, like with interactivity in real life, with other pieces of art, with relationships, you’re rewarded for your steady curiosity with context. A fitting comparison here is when, playing a point-and-click game, your attempts to interact with characters and objects in unusual ways is rewarded with new dialogue. It’s fitting because, in the end, Minute of Islands simply is a point-and-click game dressed up in walking and jumping mechanics.

That’s why it sits in this nebulous space, trying to integrate platforming into what’s a not-platformer. It lessens the potential for story-telling because it has to integrate the players choices into the narrative, and lessens the player experience because it suggests to the player potential mechanics which simply won’t be relevant. The player is “constantly discover[ing] new functions of the Omni Switch” if function is defined as button inputs. You have to press a lot of buttons in between playing. Here’s the rub, if only it was understood during development that living in the art world is itself a function, if the player could linger there more readily instead of wandering off to the next clamber or Simon Says, than Minute of Islands would make you want to stay a little longer. Staying a little longer is the core theme of the game, after all. Near the end Mo’s grandmother asks her to sit with her. It’s intimated she’s dying, but Mo says she only has a minute. “Then a minute of islands will do,” she says, and Mo sits down beside her. Cut to a panning shot of the islands you’ve traversed up to this point. It’s touching and tragic — and think how much worse it would have been if you had to press F to sit.