![]() On islands where people once lived, and a few still do, you find ramshackle sheds and farm huts, work gear and containers left from before, creaky lifts and monorails, reinforced with shipwreck driftwood, cemented by outcrops of rainbow mushrooms. Mo’s boat is a patchwork of timber, alien metal, and rubbery tentacles that uncoil into a boarding ramp. It’s a job that exposes you to both this world’s enduring hardship and its ingenuity, above and below. Now she has to manually reactivate the purifiers on every island then visit each giant to revive them. The game begins with Mo’s discovery that the giants have stopped cranking, apparently collapsed into a deep sleep. The giants have submitted to a kind of enslavement, ceaselessly winding cranks on machines that cleanse the air, with Mo in charge of maintenance to ensure the system keeps running. ![]() A disorienting concept in itself, but the cause for concern is above, in infectious fungal spores that ride the breeze, laying waste to humans and wildlife. Yet this is the grimmest of fairy tales, set on an archipelago that springs from a network of biomechanical caves with cardiac valve doors, inhabited by four pale, hairless giants. The way she ambles, hops, and floats groundward, you wouldn’t guess at her troubles. Her arms aren’t there until they unravel to pull her up to a ledge, before neatly folding back in. Mo is a girl with blue flowing hair, yellow wellies, and a matching cape wrapped up to her chin like she’s hiding in a bath towel. Each of its isles is a giant ligne claire comic panel – a little Moebius, a little Hergé – zoomed in tight to let us gorge on its detail and colour, centred on a protagonist who might have arrived from a children’s book. The bedrock of these meditations is Minute of Islands’ visual magnetism. In between inputs, it unfurls an experience of isolation, misguided obligation, and stubborn attachment to parts of a life that’s already gone. But it makes something from the long gawping pauses required to fully drink in its scenery, its gentle narration, and the satisfaction of stoic routine. It’s more quiet than noise, a walking sim disguised as a platform-puzzler which rarely wrangles its pieces into anything taxing. Minute of Islands feels like gaming’s interpretation of the old aphorism that music is the silence between the notes.
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