Minute of Islands Critic Reviews

Minute of Islands is a beautiful, unflinching game about the power to save what you hold dear and the responsibility that comes with it. Its breathtaking visual style, moving story and intensely affecting presentation add up to a one-of-a-kind puzzle-platforming experience.

Studio Fizbin have crafted a wonderful experience that achieves exactly what it sets out to do. It’s set in an intriguing world and tells an emotional story that explores a specific type of sadness, and how it affects relationships between loved ones. I can’t remember the last time a game affected me so much that I yelled at my screen due to something a character said. Despite my pedantry, I had a brilliant time with Minute of Islands and look forward to playing it again some day.

Minute of Islands delivers a beautifully told and deep story as well as great hand-drawn, comic-style visuals.

Aside from these problems, Minute of Islands is extremely impressive. Its breathtaking art style and animation are more than enough to keep players engaged, but its emotional core and thematic strength truly make it worth playing. Its gameplay may be a little limited, but this is easily outweighed by the overall package.

Minute of Islands is a fascinating work that takes the player on a journey of reflection on very delicate issues. The only sore point is the linearity of certain situations and the duration of the work.

Minute of Islands tells its tale confidently but its potential power is undercut by its mostly uninspired and largely irrelevant game play mechanics. It never felt like it mattered how I played the game because sooner or later the story would eventually unfold as long as I kept clicking and pushing the character through her small range of tasks. I think that playing through Minute of Islands is worth your time if you enjoy dark themed stories and distinctive art, but don’t come with high expectations for the puzzles or platforming.

Minute of Islands is a beautiful experience that reminds us to be human. We are weak but we are also brave.

Minute of Island sis a game focused on transmitting strong and realistic emoticons. It allows you to feel what in reality you already experience in real life like the pain of losing someone dear, the sadness of wasted years, the urgency of fixing something instead of preventing it and the anxiety of wanting something to happen, and it failing to do so. It is really easy to play with Mo, through a controller, than to play yourself in real life. It’s almost comforting to play through Minute of Islans because of that. Having this said, we believe that the game is very well made and achieves the purposed it was designed for, in a society in which we are all prisoners of a virus and the will to regain normality is always looking around the corner.

If you are looking for an intriguing story, told through the style of a bizarre colouring book, you are in for a treat. It's more an experience than an actual game, but there is no doubt Minute of Islands is not your everyday adventure.

Minute of Islands is beautiful and has some great ideas, but they’re not enough to fix some inherent design flaws.

Minute of Islands seems like a promise of a brilliant story but sadly some mechanics and developers’ choices got in the way and the game’s potential was squandered. Poorly designed platforming sequences quickly becomes tedious, while hallucinations caused by spores are boring and repetitive. I also wish the designers told me more about the intriguing world they created, because minimalist storytelling does not work here as well as it did in Journey.

While not the most substantial of releases, even in the context of this sub-genre of theme-injected side-scrolling platformers, one can’t help but hope to have discovered more in an experience like this. The origin of some parts and the reasons for others; strong and as impactful its opening remains, the game’s eventual unraveling sadly falls short of delivering on that early, promising, cleverly-distorted appearance. Pleasant that visual style and detail with its imagery remains throughout — a couple of instances where that combining of color and complexity does strike one or two favorable moments — Minute of Islands‘ unaltered, more-of-the-same approach to everything other than its imagery feels fated to be easily forgotten the moment the credits roll.

It's an all-too timely (big) mood piece.

Minute of Islands is a beautiful thing, but the gameplay can't keep up and there's no real narrative to be found.

Minute Of Islands' story - which includes a character saying the title of the game, as well as the narrator at one pont saying "no one is an island" - isn't necessarily subtle. Absent people are represented by scarecrows wearing homemade protective hazmat suits. Mo has visions of the machine attacking her, and she also hallucinates about standing on top of her own, giant, dead body. But for all its narrative bluntness, Minute Of Islands is an incredibly elegant game. Much more so than the most other indie games that are about death and grief and sadness and responsibility. In a strange way, Minute Of Islands is comforting as well. Just, you know. Don't actually tell it to your kids.

The darkness of Minute of Islands is punctuated by its light and airy art style; it’s a colorful, cartoon world that, from afar, looks like a place I’d love to live in.