Like the heart of the game itself, in those most secret parts of ourselves, that nobody but those nearest to us can see. The locus of Mo's pain, it turns out, lies within herself. No monsters to fight, no villains to overthrow. The narrator herself turns increasingly spiteful towards Mo's family, and then towards Mo herself, as the story goes on. They're worried about her and want to help, but she treats them with distrust and disdain. The humans who inhabited the islands have all either left or died all but Mo's friends and family who have stayed behind, seemingly just for her. The narrator (Mo's inner voice) has little patience for reminiscing, and even less for people. It's not long before Minute of Islands reveals what it's really about (it isn't very long in general). These memories are optional but I'd recommend seeking these out because they really serve to enrich the overall emotional palette in what would be an oppressively bleak game without them. These memories of happier days aren't lore drops, they're Mo's (and yours) only light in this dark story. You may expect these to shed some light on the history of the game world, but they are Mo's memories, so any history they contain are through her eyes. There's never any rest, there's only the next thing.Īs you explore the islands, you encounter memories of Mo's past in the form of collectibles.
You go to the places, you do the things, you slide some boxes, turn some cranks, push some levers until a thing happens. The actual act of playing Minute of Islands is about as unexciting and dispassionate as Mo thinks her job is. She's a deeply anxious person who is as distrustful of others as she is of herself, and grows increasingly self-destructive as the story progresses. There is nothing aspirational about Mo's journey. The clean, storybook visuals and lyrical narration give way to a story that's about as dark as they get. In so doing, Minute of Islands feels like you're listening to an inspirational bedtime story your parents might tell you, while simultaneously witnessing the horrifying and awful events that inspired it. In this case and many more, the images you see in front of you often sit in stark contrast against the serene, sing-song tone of the narration. When describing a beached whale, for instance, she leaves out the part where it's a rotting carcass being slowly torn apart by mangy seagulls, its intestines splayed over the shore in a grisly tableau. Voiced by Megan Gay, the narrator - who also pulls double duty as Mo's inner monologue - tells the story of the brave mechanic who lives underground, the sole caretaker of massive machines operated by giants, eternally fated to turn the cranks like hamsters at a wheel, running air purifiers that protect the archipelago from poisonous hallucinogenic spores.īut the most interesting thing about the narrator isn't what she says, but what she leaves out. Minute of Islands conveys this through what is hands-down my favourite use of an omnipresent narrator. It's deeply isolating, maybe even traumatic. Thinking you're the only person who can save the world isn't some grand, noble mission.
The writers at Studio Fizbin, however, seem much more interested in what a quest like this does to a person and those who love them. Much like Dark Souls (no, really) Mo isn't saving the world she's just doing what she can to keep it going. When we meet her, the world is already breathing its final breaths. She feels like a person having a bad day at a job she hates. Mo, our hero, doesn't feel like someone on an epic quest.
The heart of this story lies in those most secret parts of ourselves, that nobody but those nearest to us can see. The hero's journey here isn't a globe-spanning epic quest to save the universe from utter doom, it's something much more intimate. But Studio Fizbin wastes no time in setting itself apart from its genre peers. The world is in peril, a hero with a magical thingy is the only one who can fix it. When boiled down to its very essence, Minute of Islands is a fairytale.
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