Minute of Islands review - intriguing puzzler hampered by simplistic gameplay

Minute of Islands Demo

Explore strange and wonderful islands and dark labyrinths below in this narrative puzzle platformer. Guide young mechanic Mo on her quest to repair a world on the brink of collapse. The powerful Omni Switch at your disposal may not be enough to fix the damage that hides beneath the surface...

Thinking about Minute of Islands, I'm at a crossroads with myself. This is the kind of game I'd usually enjoy, but when it comes down to it, I'm not sure I did. Instead, I find that a mere day after playing, it's already starting to slip my mind.

Minute of Island's first impression certainly is striking, because it's altogether more gloomy than what you'd expect based on its art style. As the narrator tells it, as a young woman named Mo, you wake up one morning to silence where there really should be noise - the noise of machines humming underground, powering the fans that keep the islands free of lethally toxic spores.

The first view you get of what's powering the fan is a special moment, as you come face to face with a hulking giant, living underground, his only purpose seemingly that of running a crank like a hamster in a wheel. But the giant, one of a group of brothers, has tired, causing a toxic chain reaction of machine failures. Mo's task as bearer of the omni switch, a sort of part mechanical, part magical admin master key, is to reroute emergency power to a number of different fans across her small archipelago and thus restore order.

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