When boiled down to its very essence, Minute of Islands is a fairytale. The world is in peril, a hero with a magical thingy is the only one who can fix it. But Studio Fizbin wastes no time in setting itself apart from its genre peers. 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. The heart of this story lies in those most secret parts of ourselves, that nobody but those in our most intimate proximity can see.
Mo, our hero, doesn’t feel like someone on an epic quest. She feels like a person having a bad day at a job she hates. When we meet her, the world has already died. Much like Dark Souls (no really) Mo isn’t saving the world, she’s just keeping it going as best she can. But the writers at Studio Fizbin seem much more interested in what this kind of quest could do to a person and those who love them? Thinking you’re the only person who can do this isn’t some grand, noble mission. It’s deeply isolating, maybe even traumatic.
The game conveys this through what is hands down my favourite use of the omnipresent narrator. 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.
But the most interesting thing about the narrator isn’t what she says; it’s what she leaves out. 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, with its intestines splayed over the shore in a grisly tableau. In this case and many more, the images you see in front of you often sit in stark contrast against the serene tone of the narration.
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. The clean, storybook visuals and lyrical narration give way to a story that’s about as dark as they get. There is nothing aspirational about Mo’s journey.
She’s a deeply anxious person who is as distrustful of others as she is of herself, and grows increasingly self-destructive as the game progresses.
The actual act of playing Minute of Islands is about as unexciting and dispassionate as Mo thinks her job is. It isn’t awful but it also isn’t fun. It just is. You go to the places, you do the things, you slide some boxes, turn some cranks, push some levers until a thing happens. Then you move on. There’s never any rest, there’s only the next thing.
As you explore the islands, you encounter memories of Mo’s past in the form of collectibles. 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. These memories of happier days aren’t lore drops, they’re Mo’s (and yours) only light in this dark story. 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 aggressively bleak game without them.
It isn’t long before Minute of Islands reveals what it’s really about (it isn’t very long in general). The narrator (Mo’s inner voice) has little patience for reminiscing, and even less for people. The humans who inhabited the islands have all either left or died; only Mo’s friends and family have stayed behind, seemingly for her. They’re worried about her and want to help, but she treats them with distrust and disdain.
They don’t understand what she does. What she needs to do. Right?
The narrator herself turns increasingly spiteful towards Mo’s family, and then towards Mo herself, as the story goes on. There’s no combat in Minute of Islands. No monsters to fight, no villains to overthrow. The locus of Mo’s pain, it turns out, lies within herself. Like the heart of the game itself, in those most secret parts of ourselves, that nobody but those in our most intimate proximity can see. It’s why she makes a point of keeping people at a distance.
Sometimes it’s easier to close yourself off to the warmth of others. It can even feel like strength. But in its final moments, as everything crumbles around our hero, Minute of Islands hopes she can find within herself (and we within ourselves) the capacity to be vulnerable and to just… let go. Whether it comes to saving the world or saving yourself, it’s okay to ask for help. No one is an island.
Review code provided by Mixtvision. Minute of Islands is out now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.