GAME REVIEW: Minute of Islands (2021)
A slow yet interesting journey
On occasion, I browse the sales on my consoles to see if anything interesting strikes me. On this occasion, it was the artwork of a game called Minute of Islands that pulled me in to watch the trailer and check reviews, as it was slightly reminiscent of the art from Adventure Time (which is one of my all-time favorite shows). Released in 2021 by Studio Fizbin and Assemble Entertainment, the game seems to have mostly positive reviews and thus I picked it up some months ago. Now, I’m currently trying to work through my backlog of these interesting-looking games before I take on any new ones, so it’s time to get writing again.
Minute of Islands is an interesting story set in a sort of archipelago where the main character, Mo, is tasked with using the Omniswitch to repair the machinery that powers a broken and possibly dying world. Full points go to art and score, which both magnificently bring the world and story to life, especially in moments that are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. I particularly love the way the invasive spores are beautiful, but also kind of horrible.
Mechanically, it is a pretty straightforward platformer that always reminds you which buttons you need to use when doing complicated tasks (which is great if you want to pick up and put down the game over a long period of time). Up front, the game is a fairly peaceful one, allowing the player to leisurely traverse maps in order to accomplish tasks. For a storied game, I must say that the gameplay is a bit long and tedious and might have benefited from being simplified. For example, the animation for when Mo leaves a crawl space is a full 7 seconds long—that’s way too much. Manually traversing the islands to return to your boat is also a rather redundant pain in the arse. It’s furthermore hard to see the route at times, due to the 2D layout of the artwork and how generally busy the art is. There’s a world in which this story would have played out better as a short film or story, but I do see why they wanted to make a game of it.
To delve into the story from Minute of Islands, you have to descend into a pretty dark place. For all of the beauty of the artwork, this isn’t a happy game. It’s about mental health, the end of the world, broken families, and loss, so needless to say, it’s quite heavy. And yet, it’s so familiar, if you’ve had depression. Too familiar, even? The game explores duty, martyrdom, family, mental health, and the concept of “when is enough” and “when is it time to let go and stop” really beautifully, though I’ll go into more detail in the Spoiler Zone down below. Suffice to say, this was a lovely and poignant, if a bit boring game, but if you suffer from mental health issues, I recommend at very least watching a stream of it, and at best, playing it yourself. It might teach you something about who you are as well, along the way.
Spoiler Zone
As the game begins, the player is introduced to the four giant brothers, Safan, Bergan, Ande, and Afla, and the main character, Mo, who lives in an archipelago that is clinging to life following an ecological disaster caused by an invasion of noxious spores. The inciting incident involves the failure of the air purifiers that keep the spores away and we learn that Mo lives underground. Apprentice to the giants via the Omniswitch, Mo tends to the machines that the giants created to keep the islands safe from the spores. The world is already in a post-apocalyptic state after a great exodus and the subterranean vents seal to keep the poison out, but in doing so, also seal off the oxygen, causing the giants to slowly suffocate and fall asleep.
At first, Mo is playfully embittered, blaming the giants for lazily falling asleep and causing the present spore invasion, as she sets out in her boat. However, this changes through the course of the game as Mo martyrs herself and considers herself to be the only one who can save the world, carrying all of this weight on herself and refusing to allow anyone to help her. You hear the darkness of her thoughts coming through as she expresses loneliness and disdain for those who have remained, feeling that they don’t understand her struggle, her duty, and don’t really care about her. She knows they speak about her behind her back and treats them as distractions the more the game goes on. It’s notable in a few moments early on—she won’t stop for wine with her uncle or stew with her sister, and when she does sit with her grandmother for the titular minute of islands, she later regrets it, having taken time away from her duty. When she passes unopened letters, she feels that they are relatable, and later doesn’t read the letter left by her own sister, Miri.
The player quickly notes that Mo doesn’t take care of herself the way she takes care of everything else. Unlike the other remaining survivors on the islands, Mo does not wear protective gear and inhales the poison, considering it an occupational hazard. This inhalation causes multiple hallucinations throughout the game, usually during boat rides, which she has, with time, trained herself to escape by remembering a tune and seeking out a music box from within the hallucination. These hallucinations have strange premonitions that may or may not foretell the outcome of the game.
It’s clear that the ones who love Mo aren’t happy with the way she lives, that she doesn’t wear protective gear, that she stays isolated underground, that she refuses any and all forms of help (she insists that everyone else should stay inside and stay safe, while she does all the work). Her memories share the darker side of her psyche, suggesting that she is the only one who can do her duty and is trapped, with no one to be her successor if she were to ever leave.
As mentioned, she even visits her grandmother, someone she doesn’t visit because she loves her so much, and actually takes a moment to sit with her grandmother for a moment—something she hadn’t yet done with anyone else. But, her grandmother has two mourning dolls (it’s unclear as to who they are for, but the simplest theory is that they are for Mo’s parents) that she asks Mo to take to a place that Mo genuinely dreads: the graveyard. Here, there are no machines to fix, just memories of those lost along the way in a heavily overgrown chamber. Mo’s bitterness at having to do something that is not part of her duty and is not something she wants to do speaks volumes, as her discomfort turns her thoughts hostile.
After saving three of the four giants, Mo then faces a nemesis, Fenja, who has been building an ark with which to leave the archipelago. This is, frankly, tragic, because this girl is a practical genius equal to Mo, but they are not friends despite their inherent commonalities. Fenja sees the truth, that the islands are dying, and has been preparing for the inevitable evacuation. Mo takes this as a personal insult, that Fenja does not believe in her ability to protect the island, and the ark is proof therein. When Fenja refuses to give her the map to the final island, Mo outright assaults her, clubbing her with the Omniswitch and breaking it in the process.
Ignoring the outburst and its resulting catastrophic fallout, Mo continues onward to the final island, only to be unable to find it. It turns out that the last giant has already died and this place cannot be fixed or healed. Eventually, she crawls up to the topmost peak that remains and breaks down, realizing, as the game puts it, that no one is an island. No one can take on the world’s problems alone. No one can be everything for everyone. It’s brutal, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s so true.
The game closes with everyone on Fenja’s ship, leaving their now-dead world to be consumed by the spores, with Mo standing silently next to Miri. Despite the heartbreak and the pain of the realization that Mo had to give up on her duty and quest… she’s still going to be okay. It’s an important ending to the story. She’s with her family again and they’re moving on to new and better things. Sometimes, that’s all you can really do.
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