Review: Thoughtful puzzle platformer Minute of Islands Surprise released on Sunday

You’ve heard this story before. While the details may be different, the thrust of the story is the same. When the world sucks, there is only one person who can save us – the chosen one, through her sheer power of chosenness, must embark on a disastrous journey to stop the terrible that threatens the world.

It’s Link in Legend of Zelda, Master Chief in Halo, Kratos in God of War. These types of heroes also appear in smaller stories, in more intimate worlds, like the player character in Cozy grove, constantly accepting the needs of everyone else. But being a hero can be isolating, even traumatic.

Image: Studio Fizbin / Mixtvision Games

Minute of the islands, the surprising release of the German developer Studio Fizbin am Sonntag, is about this aspect of being a chosen one. The hero of the game is Mo, and she is a young mechanic who was knighted to save her world by helping four giants who live beneath the planet’s crust. The game uses the trope on purpose and frames it as if it were a story to be told, the keyboard clicks shifting the narrative like the rustle of the pages of a book.

The story begins on a series of small islands that have long been abandoned, save for a few stragglers destined to search the land poisoned by a poisonous mushroom that kills and consumes everything living. One of those stragglers is Mo, the child mechanic whose job it is to watch the huge, grotesque, human-like creatures that live underground in deep mechanical labyrinths. These creatures once lived above the earth and thrived among humans, but were – out of duty – forced underground to operate a system that purifies the air so that humans can breathe. But these rapidly aging systems often break down. Mo, the story goes, is the only person who can fix these creatures and save the doomed land with a tool called the Omni Switch. And with that she also saves her family, who stayed here to keep Mo in the lurch.

Image: Studio Fizbin / Mixtvision Games

Minute of the islands‘Hero’s journey serves a clear purpose. Studio Fizbin doesn’t necessarily undermine the trope, but rather thinks about what it means to be a hero and for whom. Mo is familiar with the islands, places where she grew up and spent her youth: her parents’ house, her uncle’s abandoned amusement park, a once busy lighthouse. Mo explores these places through lightweight 2D platforms that are peppered with simple movement puzzles – place objects to cover a path, turn wheels to open a gate. During her journey, Mo gathers memories of these places, of the time before the mushroom conquered the world. It passes bloody seagulls and decaying whales, rusted metal and rotting wood to repair the giant-powered air purification system. She climbs between the worlds, the fungus-infested top and the fleshy underside where the giants live, and resets the systems one by one – exposing herself to the poisonous fungus.

Through the narration of the game, the player gets a glimpse of Mo’s internal dialogue – and as the game progresses we see the effects of her “fate”, the only one who can save the islands. Mo pushes her family away – people who are obviously worried about them – and succumbs to pressure to be the chosen one. The descent is slow, but it is painful to attend as Mo creates rifts with her uncle, sister, friends, and grandmother. Meanwhile, Mo still performs little rituals to calm himself down, but the narrative arc is clear: The mission to protect this land is devastating Mo and her family.

The darkness of Minute of the islands is characterized by its light and airy art style; It’s a colorful cartoon world that from a distance looks like a place I’d love to live. The platform and puzzles are simple and satisfying. But examination of the details reveals a darker truth, of those bloody birds and the violent but beautiful mushroom. The visual design makes the game easy even in those moments when Mo is at the moment you

Image: Studio Fizbin / Mixtvision Games

Even so, Mo always has happier memories to come back to. Finding objects and spaces that trigger Mo’s memories – a button literally suggests “remembering” to the player – creates small but effective moments. You can complete the game without collecting these, but they are important in creating the light in Mo’s darkness, and it is these memories that ultimately become your lifeline in the roughly six hours that the game lasts. When Mo remembers the time she admired the island air before the disaster, she grounds what matters. In her constant rush to save the island, she can only spend a minute that day exploring its surroundings with her grandmother.

It is Mo’s grandmother who urges Mo to go to a place she has always feared. It turns out the place isn’t nearly as disgusting as the intricate musculature of the underground caves or the harsh reality that the island is being killed by mushrooms. Instead, it’s beautiful; the full scope of Minute of the islands‘Colors are full to see, with intricate, wonderful mushrooms growing out of what was once flesh and spores. But this is also a place that Mo can only enter without the convenience of her Omni Switch. Their fear, it seems, is not related to the monstrous but to the vulnerability.

It can sometimes be easier to isolate yourself, shielded from a dangerous sense of strength and resilience, rather than make yourself emotionally vulnerable. This is the aspect of the hero’s journey that Minute of the islands pushes back against. Is Mo really meant to be? Is she really the only person who can save this world and does she have to? What would happen if she asked for help?

The minute of the islands was released June 13th for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. (An Xbox version will be released “soon after.”) The game was verified using a Windows PC download code provided by the publisher Mixtvision Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect the editorial content, although Vox Media can earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. you find more information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.