Media criticism, especially video games, is usually a comparative art form; you compare a title to its forebears, both chronological and spiritual, and pass your judgment. “Resident Evil 5 wasn’t as good as Resident Evil 4,” critics cry. ”DOOM is everything Wolfenstein 3D was and more.” Most games have some sort of contemporary that provide a defined source of measure, an origin point for the resulting score.
Minutes is one of those games that defies this sort of rule for a number of reasons: it’s utterly unique in its design and presentation, offering up hints of its inspiration, but never slavishly ascribing to any one particular point of influence.
The first title from Richard Odgen’s Red Phantom Games, Minutes all but thumbs its nose at Ogden’s racing-heavy resume to deliver a minimalist arcade game that doses out its strangeness in 60-second chunks. You control a free-roving circle with two simple goals: collect all of the colored items and avoid all of the black items, and do it all without dying in a minute, like a time-crunching Ikaruga. It starts simply enough, with horizontal and vertical lines slicing across the playing field at manageable distances, allowing you to easily fill up the goal-oriented stars that unlock further levels. However, like all good games, the layers of simplicity are slowly peeled away level by level, revealing the brutally hard core at the game’s center. Within a few levels, your circle is expanding and contracting at your command, trying to navigate an increasingly chaotic field of twirling shapes that will help and harm you within a fraction of a second. It’s a dead simple idea, and one that never wears out its welcome due to the aggressively short levels; by the time you realize you’re getting drained on the frantic speed of the game, you’ve finished a level and you can put the controller down.
The game itself is structured an awful lot like a mobile game (a characteristic shared with another PS4/Vita title Escape Plan), with stars earned in each level unlocking later levels, and even a daily challenge which pits you against other players for leaderboard supremacy. It feels odd on the sizable handheld or your living room television, but it works really well and is oddly prescient of where gaming is headed, with consoles becoming multimedia hubs that you use for less interactive forms of entertainment, as well as games. They’re becoming information filters, much like smartphones, and Minutes and its mobile-game sensibilities makes perfect sense in that context.
Aesthetically, the game is simple and minimalist. The lines and shapes swirling around each other look like a Powerpoint template come to life, cast over oddly beautiful backgrounds, and set to a thumping techno soundtrack. The music itself adds immensely, as the game becomes entangled within the rhythms and starts to influence and assist you. This is not the sort of audiovisual presentation that will bring your Playstation 4 or even the Vita to their knees (the game is available on both as of this review), but the game commits wholly to its razor sharp simplicity, and reaps all of the benefits.
Minutes may not be revolutionary or a particularly deep game, but its instantly accessible simplicity, clean presentation, and easily dosed bites of gaming goodness make it a fun, short-term diversion to fill in those tiny gaps of time when you can’t load up a full-sized game, but still need a quick diversion from real life.