PEGBRJE: Minit and ROM
Normally I have a quirky intro that involves how these two are loosely related. Well, both have pixels.
Minit is a peculiar puzzle game made as a collaboration between Jan Willem Nijman, Kitty Calis, Jukio Kallio, and Dominik Johann, whom affectionately called themselves JW, Kitty, Jukio, and Dom. I’ve heard of them individually through their differing works and was surprised to see that they made a puzzle game together when I first booted up Minit. In it, you play as a nameless protagonist who I swear looks like a duck and I want to be a duck. As you explore, you collect items that will help you solve more puzzles in a typical open world style where you can do anything and nothing at the same time. The twist, however is in the name, regardless of the spelling.
See, Minit only gives you a minute to live. If you run out of life due to carelessness or a full minute passes, you die and respawn back at your house, with the whole world resetting. Well, partially. The puzzles, your items and any other important information remain static to the actions that you committed upon them. Solved a puzzle that allows you to push boxes? You can now push boxes forever. Collect a new item that has an action? It spawns at your doorstep every time you die so you can pick it up again if need be.
Games that have timers on how much you can get done are usually criticized of artificial difficulty — a game is hard not because it is challenging, but because there is a time constraint to complete or it ends in failure. Minit, however, uses this ‘artificial difficulty’ as the basis of its entire game design. Tasks in Minit are not overtly difficult, usually involving finding an object and taking it to a certain location to unlock a new object. The addition of a constant timer, however, shakes up the entire way you look at the puzzles. Distance from spawn point becomes a huge factor in your ability to solve a puzzle — can I make it to there and solve it before the minute ends, or should I try exploring a different way? Should I change my spawnpoint to the Hotel instead and see if I can make it to a new destination? These are questions constantly asked to yourself as you try to figure out what exactly is the plot and reasoning behind your little duck’s actions as you swing your cursed sword through crabs, skeletons and snakes.
Doubling down on the aspect of decision making is the ability to only carry one ‘action’ item at once. Need your sword to cut through a tree? Great, but you know there is a plant that needs watering on the other side, so you must go back home and grab it. Finding the different routes littered throughout Minit that allow for shortcuts once certain items are discovered is extremely satisfying, because I still can’t get the boots and run fast yet. Deciding on whether to simply explore with a watering can or to not go as far and try to maximize puzzle solving in the immediate area is a constant thought in your mind, and won’t ever leave.
Minit is not without its flaws — for those that cannot read quickly, there will be some seriously agonizing moments where precious seconds are lost trying to get the clue to the next puzzle from a stray wanderer. It asks you to juggle the time and your own recollection of the words or actions of a stranger across the game world, and there will be times that you just wander if you miss an item. I’ll admit that I had to cheat to figure out where an item was simply because I missed the tiny pathway near the start of the game, and it set me back what felt like hours of my life. Patience, oddly enough, is required for a game that only gives you limited amounts of time to complete.
Minit does something odd in somehow combining the replayability found in rogue-likes through permadeath and the feeling of ‘constant runs’ to acquire the necessary items of a puzzle game. Hours can get sucked away as instead of ‘one more turn’ it becomes a literal ‘one more minute’ moment. If you are a fan of puzzle games, I strongly recommend the satisfying twist that Minit can bring to the table. Apparently it can be spedrun in 22 minutes, but I’m fairly certain it took me that long to find the watering can…
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a cyberpunk investigative reporting sim.
2064: Read Only Memories is a narrative-based cyberpunk game made by MidBoss, which makes a previous review of a game called MidBoss very confusing for record keeping. Set in the stated year, ROM has you play as a journalist struggling to eek out a living when suddenly a tiny cute robot appears. Suddenly it’s a race to find the creator of the robot, aptly named Turing, and put your detective skills to work. You explore different avenues of interest, get yourselves into dangerous territories, and get placed in uncomfortable situations asking the penultimate question: what is humanity? Where does the line get drawn, or is there even a line worth drawing? And do robots dream of electric sheep? Such questions have been asked before by many mediums, yet ROM approaches it with something I’d not yet experienced: the ability to fail.
I’m well versed in failure when it comes to visual novels — I’ve tried my best to avoid it, but there are always a few playthroughs that end in disaster. Make a few mistakes here and there, and the main love interest tells you off and the defeat screen appears. ROM takes a different approach, lulling you into a railroaded experience by making you believe that you have no real choices. After all, they show large arrows on where to go, conversations seem more like novels in how they play out with proper writing and some decisions made just loop back. Yet there is one instance early on in the game where you attempt to stop a car from escaping you, and I failed. I had let the car escape, and when it came back as a failsafe, I misclicked and watched it drive off again. In that moment, I looked back on all of the decisions I made while talking and wondered if they all too changed how each person viewed me. Nothing felt safe anymore.
ROM slyly convinced me their world through the possibility of failure, but not all hope was lost. Thankfully, my robot companion and I had backups — just like in real life. I had to accept the fact that I couldn’t do things the way I had originally wanted, and change course. The cyberpunk world was cruel, and I would need all of my wits and apparent charm to scheme my way into solving the mystery. The narrative would continue with or without me, I just needed to adapt to my new circumstance. I actually contemplated how much I would have to fail in order for the game to hard fail me, but that’s another story.
I would like to mention that this isn’t my first time playing a cyberpunk dystopian narrative game, as oddly niche as that sounds. In fact, ROM draws heavily from its predecessor VA-11 HALL-A, a bartending visual novel about the life of a bartender just trying to mix drinks and ends up changing lives. While both games have different approaches to decision making, neither give you a straight answer on how to approach a situation. Jill, the bartender in VA-11 HALL-A can make the most correct drink for the order, or make it larger to get more money but risk the patron becoming intoxicated, taking the story somewhere else. Both games give the player the weight that their actions can directly effect how the story will turn out, for better or for worse, and to find out as you go. Funny enough, the owner of VA-11 HALL-A makes a cameo appearance in ROM, if you are so inclined to find her.
2064: Read Only Memories is a fun narrative adventure within the cyberpunk narrative field that I encourage fans of VA-11 HALL-A and others in the genre to try out. There are a few quirks within the plot that I could go into, but the general appeal and mindset the game has is solid. Also the Stardust bar has the best soundtrack section in the game. Seriously, it’s so good.
As always, links to both are below.
