A peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time.
Minit is a video game developed by Devolver Digital and released on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on 3 April, 2018, with a release for the Nintendo Switch set for later in the year.
In Minit, the player controls a normal person who stumbles on a cursed sword; at the end of every minute thereafter, the person dies and returns to their home, in perfect health minus the time over their head. The player must explore the environment and make what progress they can in sixty-second intervals in order to lift the curse.
On February 18, 2021, a spin-off was released: Minit Fun Racer, a Racing Game. 100% of its proceeds go directly to charity, making it a fun racer AND a fundraiser.
This game has examples of:
- Ability Required to Proceed: The player has to find different items in order to overcome various obstacles. As an example, the player starts with most routes past their house blocked by shrubbery, which can be cut and moved past once they acquire the sword.
- All Deserts Have Cacti: The flat, endless sand of the game's desert is littered with cacti.
- BFS: The Sword is as big as the player character, and the Mega Sword is wider as well.
- Blackout Basement: Several areas are pitch dark, and without a flashlight the only thing you can see is yourself.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Completing the game 100% unlocks Mary's Mode, which removes the timer. It can be useful if you're trying for the minimal runs achievement, but other than that there's not much to do with it.
- Broken Bridge: The various Ability Required to Proceed obstacles, one of which is a literal broken bridge between the factory and hotel.
- Cartoon Creature: All of the characters fall somewhere on a scale between humanoid and animalian, with only a handful fitting firmly in either end. The player character itself is mostly humanoid, but for a beak of some sort.
- Cave Behind the Falls: One of the coins can be found by entering a waterfall.
- Charged Attack: Throwing the sword, once unlocked, requires the attack button to be held down for a brief period.
- Checkpoint: There are four buildings that can become your respawn point, which relieves a lot of time pressure when you need to complete tasks in certain areas of the map.
- Collection Sidequest: Nineteen coins are scattered across the land. Collecting seven allows you to get the Sprint Shoes, and collecting all of them awards you a Heart Container.
- Curse: The player character falls victim to one when they pick up the Sword; they will die and come back to life every minute.
- Dark Reprise: The final area's theme is a dark, dramatic reprise of the first's.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Death comes with no penalty beyond returning you to a house and resetting any mission you only went halfway on.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The game is rendered entirely in black and white pixels, presumably to save on production time and cost.
- Developer's Foresight: If you beat the Second Run by going to the toilet as soon as possible to flush the sword, skipping a large chunk of the endgame in the process, the game acknowledges it by displaying "Shortcut" on the ending screen.
- 11th-Hour Superpower: The Mega Sword deals more damage and is obtained just before the final boss.
- End-Game Results Screen: A final screen pops up once you complete the game, showing the mode, the number of runs, percentage of items collected, and time taken.
- Exact Time to Failure: A timer at the top of the screen shows how many seconds you have until you die.
- Final Boss: The boss of the factory mass-producing the cursed swords objects to you interfering with his plans and fights you. Defeating him breaks the curse for good.
- Fog Feet: The ghosts take the form of heads with wispy lower halves.
- Gainax Ending: After defeating the final boss and shutting down the factory, the game jumps to the credit roll upon flushing the broken sword down a toilet.
- Grimy Water: The polluted water near the factory will damage you if you attempt to swim in it.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Zig-zagged. Enemies and terrain elements are reset every time you die, as well as tasks that have only partly been completed, but completing sidequests and gathering items are kept progress.
- Heart Container: Six of them scattered across the world, each allowing you to take one more hit before dying.
- Hearts Are Health: Keeping with its retro styling, your health is represented as hearts.
- Heroes Love Dogs: The player character has a pet dog. Bringing it a bone you find in a graveyard nets you a Heart Container.
- Hidden Agenda Villain: The reasons behind the factory boss producing a shit-ton of cursed swords are never elaborated upon.
- Letting the Air out of the Band: Picking up the sword has item get note falter and pewter out, and is quickly replaced by rapid clock ticks.
- Limited Loadout: Of the items that can be directly used, only one can be held at a time, meaning you'll need to return to your house and put down your sword to pick up your watering can or camera.
- Madness Mantra: One room in the game is crammed full of signs that all say the same thing: "Factories are bad".
- Metroidvania: The game world is pretty interconnected and lacks level breaks. The player becomes stronger and better able to overcome obstacles by exploring and finding different items.
- Money for Nothing: There are nineteen coins that can be found throughout the game, and they can only be used to acquire two things: for seven, the Sprint Shoes, and for all nineteen, a heart. Weirdly, the merchants don't even take the money once you can afford their products.
- New Game Plus: Beating the game unlocks the Second Run, which ups the difficulty by lowering the time of one life from sixty seconds to forty. Additionally, some items and enemies have shifted locations, meaning players can't rely entirely on their own memories. Finally, the player becomes a One-Hit-Point Wonder and every heart they pick up (except for the one they can buy for 19 coins) shatters instead of granting more HP.
- No Name Given: None of the characters have names with the exception of a ghost named Mary.
- Now You Tell Me: The warning to not touch the sword appears in the second run, and you need to collect the sword to read said message.
- One-Winged Angel: The factory boss fights you by absorbing the power of all of his swords, turning into a living bundle of swords that shoots out other swords.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Finding a haunted house and moving up or down the stairs to the correct floor will turn the bone piles scattered throughout the world into ghosts that give hints about different puzzles.
- Parrying Bullets: Your character can stop arrows and other projectiles by hitting them with their sword.
- Pig Man: Several of the staff of The Factory, including the boss, make pig-like snorting noises when speaking.
- Precision-Guided Boomerang: Once thrown, the sword will always return to your hand, allowing it to hit enemies twice.
- Rambling Old Man Monologue: A person by the sea will tell you where you can find some treasure, but only after you listen to them vveeeeerryyyyy ssllooooowwllyyyyy talk about how much they love the ocean. Learning those directions will likely necessitate that player put aside a full minute's run just for that purpose.
- Right on Queue: When the player enters the factory, the receptionist directs them to customer service, which has an expansive line. Wait as long as you're able to, but it will never move.
- Sprint Shoes: Shoes that increase your running speed can be acquired from a store once you've found seven coins.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: The player can acquire a glove that lets them throw their sword after a brief charging period.
- Timed Mission: You only have sixty seconds at a time to accomplish any of the tasks before you. This is reduced to forty in Second Run mode.
- Time Title: Creative spelling of "minute", because you die after 60 seconds.
- Threatening Shark: Trying to swim into certain areas of the ocean will result in a shark chasing after you. It moves faster than you can swim, can follow you between screens, and can take you down in one hit.
- Too Kinky to Torture: The clerk at the hotel reacts to you hitting them with your sword by demanding you hit them more and saying that they've "always dreamed of this."
- Version-Exclusive Content: The PC version includes a camera item, which you can use to take pictures and later view them on a website. The console versions of the game replace the camera with a press pass.
- Waiting Puzzle: One of the coins can only be collected after waiting in a certain area for a while.
- Warp Whistle: There's a televator network that can transport you between four locations on the map.
