Writing about MINIT but every minute I start from the beginning again, which seemed like a good gimmick when I began


1. MINIT is a game in which you set off on an adventure and pick up a cursed sword and then immediately find yourself stuck in a one-minute time loop. Whatever you do from that point, wherever you go next, you find yourself - after one minute - returned to your home. You wake on unpolished floorboards and you start all over again: fences that you smashed through have regrown, neighbours have

2. In 2018’s adventure game MINIT, a cursed sword sends you into a time loop. A counter counts down from sixty; once it hits ten, each passing second reverberates with an ominous tick through the land. When the counter hits zero, the world dissolves around you, and you wake up again where you started a minute ago, the vase you smashed last time just in case it had a coin inside it miraculously refo

3. When you try something in MINIT and fail, you don't have time to try again. You are - as the game’s name gently hints - trapped, perhaps for eternity, in a 60-second time loop. So instead, every time you fail, you start back at the beginning. You strike out in, perhaps, the same direction you just tried, and you aim to do a little better, get just a little further. And when

4. When you are stuck in a time loop, you quickly learn to optimise. How fast can you get to the lighthouse? Is it quicker to go left around the house, or right? As you play MINIT - which returns you every 60 seconds to your doomed starting place - these are the tiny second-saving shortcuts you learn, the habits you piece togeth

5. In most videogames with a story and a wider world, you explore as if you are on a journey - the sort of journey almost none of us take in real life, a massive hike across a continent, a hero's journey, an exploration, a discovery. In MINIT, you explore the world as if you'd just moved house: dozens of tiny journeys, around the corner, down to the coast, to the shops, the bar, past that guy who hangs out at the corner.

6. MINIT is a timeloop game from Jan Willem Nijman. Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio and Dominik Johann. Since it’s a timeloop game, you walk the same paths over and over. But the only time I really resented the repeated trek was a walk through an evil factory to the boss: through the office and down the shipping yard and into the factory itself, trying to cut off a second or two each time, realising when I’m just a little too slow and I’m running late and everything is terrible. Commuting sucks.

7. If MINIT is about capitalism - and it probably is: as someone pointed out on twitter, the text very literally invites you to throw your body upon the wheels of the machine - then what is the significance of the things you can carry with you from one minute-long lifespan to the next? Some special objects. Knowledge. Damage done incrementally to the system that has trapped you. The location of your new home?

8. For a game that might be about the evils of capitalism, you sure do end MINIT in possession of a whole load of houses

9. Perhaps one of the things that the timeloop adventure game MINIT is about is what it means to be part of a community, and what things you can do within a community that might matter: your habits; the help you give your neighbours; the more long-term campaigns you embark on and chip away at incidentally, day after day. Also whether you own any cool swimming gear or not.

10. In MINIT, you walk your neighbourhood over and over. Every time you pass some guy in the grass he says the same thing to you. Hey, did you pick up that cursed sword? Please visit the factory as soon as possible! Of course he says that, he's the cursed sword guy. He has opinions on what you should do with the cursed sword. He is a familiar stranger you grow to almost but not quite ignore as you swerve past.

11. MINIT is a game in which you first acquire, and subsequently desperately attempt to rid yourself of, a cursed sword that traps you in a minute-long time loop. As you head out from your home in a dozen different directions, you eventually learn that an evil factory is manufacturing many hundreds of these cursed swords, while the maniacal boss laughs evilly and machines chug and

12. The inciting incident in MINIT is this: you pick up a cursed sword. Theoretically - you may begin to think as you play - you could just avoid the sword, and then you would never get trapped in a perpetual timeloop. But the sword factory just out of sight on the other side of the river would still be there, churning out cursed sword after cursed sword.

13. Wait, if there are thousands of cursed swords out in the world, surely someone else has already gotten themselves trapped in a time loop. What does that mean for you? How many times have you worked through this very minute you’re experiencing, oblivious? If you are even now as you read this trapped in a minute-long timeloop off the back of someone else’s cursed sword, where is the join, what point in the last minute of your life was the point to which the loop will soon return you?

14. In the time-loop adventure game MINIT, you are trapped in a sixty-second cycle by your cursed sword, which is both agent of your misfortune and tool to act upon the world. You also have a watering can, which does not seem to be cursed. The watering can helps plants to grow. It puts out fires. It saves a stranger in the desert from dying. It does not free you from your timeloop curse, and I guess that's why you never need to refill it, because it never runs out of water before you are forced to travel back in time to a point where it was full.

15. As I play MINIT - a 2018 adventure game from Jan Willem Nijman. Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio and Dominik Johann - I think about how neatly the conceit of a timeloop curse explains so many of the conventions of videogames: the passers-by who always have the same thing to say, the vessel that never needs to be refilled. I don’t think MINIT is about these conventions, but

16. Here is, I think, the funniest joke in time-loop minute-repeater MINIT: the man by the lighthouse who speaks slowly, s l o w l y, the game refusing your sense of urgency as the letters of his dialogue pop up o n e b y o n e and who are you to demand different?

17. When I play games, I usually intend to play for ten minutes, maybe twenty. And I don't really think about what that means, and whether it's realistic: will I want to stop? What will I have accomplished? But MINIT's minute-long rounds make the consequences of your decisions very clear. If you play for ten minutes, you will get to try to do an absolute maximum of ten different things. Choose wisely, I guess? Or maybe play for longer...

18. I am interested in the way that games make your awareness of time shift - maybe two hours go by in a moment, maybe each second is filled with more decisions than you knew were possible. The pace of hurry in MINIT is like rushing for a bus that you think you're going to make - but only if you get a move on. You’re never dependent on tiny split-second timing, but there’s always a sense of: come on, don't hang about.

19. MINIT seems crafted, with its minute-long time loops, for commutes and spare moments, but in fact it rewards more prolonged play. The ideal commute game has everything that you need to know on screen, it doesn't require you to have a model of the world in your head or a memory of your plans, you can stop and start at a moment's notice; whereas in MINIT you are constantly building up intentions and memories and routes, and a break will disrupt them.

20. The rhythms of MINIT are the rhythms of a game that’s in a hurry: quick sentences to establish the premise, quick movement, the black-and-white aesthetic acting as a kind-of visual shorthand that can be taken in at a glance, everything focused on obstructions and light and dark and movement rather than details.

21. I read a few articles about the 2018 time-loop game MINIT and they all mentioned the old 2D Zelda games. I have never played a 2D Zelda game, but perhaps - I think guiltily as I load MINIT again instead of its precursor - I can pretend that I have? I played Ocarina of Time, the first of the Zelda series’ 3D era, so maybe I can triangulate between that and MINIT to figure out what the earlier games must have been like?

22. The Zelda game equidistant between 1986’s Legend of Zelda and 2018’s MINIT is 2002’s Wind Waker. Is this significant? MINIT also has a boat in it, I guess.

23. What does it mean for the timeloop game MINIT to have a relationship to the Zelda games so strong that all the reviews I’ve looked at bring it up? What is the nature of that relationship? In what characteristic of MINIT does it reside? Is it the sword, is it the malleability of time, is it the blank but obliging protagonist and a perpetual list of growing errands?

24. Anyway.

25. 2018’s MINIT, from Jan Willem Nijman. Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio and Dominik Johann, is cute and friendly and

26. MINIT, a 2018 game from Jan Willem Nijman. Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio and Dominik Johann, is

27. Look. Okay. Usually when you do something over and over in a game, you get frustrated because of the easy bit, the thing you have to get through before you get to the part where you die. In MINIT, you do repeat yourself a lot, but you can optimise: hug the wall a little better, cut a moment or two off your travel, gain more time to travel a little further

28. In MINIT, you are stuck in a minute-long time loop. Which sucks! A minute is hardly long enough to do anything! (If you complete the game, you get to play again in a new and harder version of the game where your minute is instead 40 seconds long.)

29. Ever since I first saw the timeloop movie Groundhog Day, I've had a low-key worry that I might one day get stuck in a time loop that just isn't long enough to get anything done.

30. The first time I saw the timeloop classic Groundhog Day, I developed a low-key worry that I might one day get stuck in a time loop that's too short for any of the fun stuff. No extravagant meals, no drinking to excess without the hangover, no reading people's minds, no learning and gradually improving yourself, no breaking into hidden places knowing that your actions would be consequence-free: just moments, inescapable, constantly resetting. And then MINIT, which

31. MINIT is, perhaps, an argument against thinking by the day or the week. MINIT is an argument for the primacy of two types of time: the whole life, the accretion of hundreds of tiny decisions; and the immediate, what you do at this very moment. MINIT says: nobody cares what you're doing in an hour. What are you doing now? What will you have done, ten years from now?

32. MINIT is

33. The meticulous timing encouraged by the timeloop adventure game MINIT parallels the meticulousness of the game itself: the way the decisions its creators have made funnel it towards being exactly the thing it needs to be at any given point.

34. It is not always clear to me as I play how much I enjoy MINIT, an extremely well-crafted time-loop game from Jan Willem Nijman. Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio and Dominik Johann. It is a game that is so extremely well crafted that if you play it as a designer you spend a lot of time thinking "oh, I see, that’s clever" and "ah, yes, this is extremely well crafted", which can make it difficult to tell what

35. When you begin playing the timeloop game MINIT, there is no countdown. You have not yet picked up the cursed sword - though if you’re playing the game in 2019, you no doubt know what’s coming - and so you can walk around at will, free, poking at things and wandering and wasting time because for now, just for a little longer, you have so much of it

36. I had a few of those long lazy summers as a kid, the ones that you think back on with a mixture of resentment and nostalgia once the daily tasks of adulthood kick in. I remember weeks of eating plums off the neighbour’s tree, of lying with a book on a trampoline. Once you’re trapped in MINIT’s grotesque timeloop, the first few minutes of the game - when you can wander and poke at will - take on that feeling of opportunities squandered, of not knowing what you had when

37. The seconds that pass in MINIT reverberate like the long shadows of autumn as the sunlight turns golden and the sun goes down and suddenly the day is over, and you never did get outside to take advantage of it properly, did you? Where did the time go? It went into the past.

38. Look, we are all trapped in a timeloop by astronomy, and

39. Sometimes a walk to the train station can be filled with the novelty of a new moment: here’s a cat, this tree’s leaves have started to fall, the man in this shop is talking on the phone and he’s angry. Sometimes a walk to the train station is so familiar it barely exists, your brain doesn’t store it, it just ticks off oh another one of those and then says “job done”

40. Some minutes, the timeloop adventure game MINIT is about squandered time. In others it is about the evils of capitalism. Sometimes it’s about the nature of videogames, or about neighbourliness. Or it really is just about figuring out how to jam a terrible machine. This is what it’s like when you do something over and over: whatever that thing is, you find space in it for new meanings.