![]() To escape the mirages the fungus makes her mind see, you have to collect a few glowing, flying sea creatures in order, mostly by walking from one end of the screen to the other and until you come across them, then climbing a platform to get close enough to reach them. On her way from one island to the other on her boat, Mo crosses into large clouds of yellow spores, breathing in so much of the stuff it causes her to get lost in hallucinations. Unfortunately, it feels just as unexciting to play. It looks like rote, simple work when Mo does it, one of the few times you see her arms emerge from between the folds of her yellow coat. Once you reach a fan, you go through a sequence of button presses to get it running again: turn a crank, connect the omni switch to a power outlet, connect a glowing line of energy to the fan, pump some energy over. This is well-acted, atmospheric stuff, which doesn't get overly obtrusive. Mo's actions and thoughts are always given voice by an omnipresent narrator - though I hasten to say the narration feels very different from the one in Biomutant, the other narrated game of the hour. Certain images are slightly gruesome, not nothing that veers into overly uncomfortable territory Despite the fact that most climbable surfaces are marked with some white gunk and the odd movable item gets a little effect to signify that, too, it can be hard to tell where you can climb up and get down whenever it isn't deliberately made obvious thanks to the seamlessness of the art. And so you climb up hills and platforms until you reach the mechanical fans, all at quite a leisurely tempo considering there are deadly spores in the air and plenty of corpses nearby from the lives it already claimed. Looking at them through Mo's eyes tells the story of places long abandoned, places that she for some reason still feels responsible for. These environments are beautiful, heaving with small details like the clutter of a thoroughly lived-in house or the dilapidated remains of a theme park. Minute of Islands is probably closest to a platformer, in that you sometimes actually jump from platform to platform, but mostly just try to find your way around in the 2D side-scrolling environments. The gameplay revolves around getting to these fans in the first place. Mo's task as bearer of the omni switch, a sort of part mechanical, part magical admin master key, is to reroute emergency power to a number of different fans across her small archipelago and thus restore order. But the giant, one of a group of brothers, has tired, causing a toxic chain reaction of machine failures. The first view you get of what's powering the fan is a special moment, as you come face to face with a hulking giant, living underground, his only purpose seemingly that of running a crank like a hamster in a wheel. As the narrator tells it, as a young woman named Mo, you wake up one morning to silence where there really should be noise - the noise of machines humming underground, powering the fans that keep the islands free of lethally toxic spores. ![]() Minute of Island's first impression certainly is striking, because it's altogether more gloomy than what you'd expect based on its art style. Availability: Out now on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch.Instead, I find that a mere day after playing, it's already starting to slip my mind. This is the kind of game I'd usually enjoy, but when it comes down to it, I'm not sure I did. ![]() Thinking about Minute of Islands, I'm at a crossroads with myself. Minute of Islands is a beautiful thing, but the gameplay can't keep up and there's no real narrative to be found.
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