Review — The Minims: A New Beginning

The Minims: A New Beginning

The Minims is an enjoyable point and click adventure and here is our review of The Minims

The Minims is the debut, 3D point and click adventure game from Beyond Those Hills. A new indie development studio in Athens, Greece.

The game opens on a stormy night, slowly panning up to a single tree located on the rocky cliff-side. Lightning flickered illuminating the scenery as dull orange text appeared at the bottom of my screen. The tutorial prompted me to hold shift to rotate the camera and left click to interact with the tree. Shifting the camera around and solving puzzles is the meat of the game. At least they don’t go down the road of overly convoluted solutions.

After the short intro you meet an odd, yet cute, blob which seems to be our main character. I really liked the music in The Minims from the little intro that played after the first puzzle; though afterwards the first thing I noticed was that there is not a lot of music. I let the game idle for a few minutes to see if it just hadn’t started yet but the only thing I heard was the ambient background noise and crow that squawked every so often. The music that does appear in The Minims was beautiful and very fitting. This is why I even bring it up. I wanted more of it. I haven’t decided if this was a bad thing or not as I am sure bad repetitive music would be much worse than no music at all.

Upon trying to find an option menu in The Minims I couldn’t. I hit several keys to see if anything would happen. The only key that worked was the left control key. Hitting control brings up a sort of pause menu with two buttons. One takes you to a hint page while the other takes you to a rather sparse options menu with two more buttons. One a page with the game’s website and social media and the other with just a few game settings. Three to be exact. While not a major complaint I would have liked some sound sliders.

Once you’ve completed the tutorial stage you find out the cute blobs name is Mii. He belongs to a race called The Minims which the game is named after. Strikingly we learn he has a girlfriend named Mo. Exploring Mii’s room was very neat. I loved some of the self-referential things inside the game. The puzzles weren’t very difficult. It walked the line of being an exploration, experience, and actual game.

Except for a few shortcomings I was very surprised with The Minims. This being such a small project I’ve found a lot more fun and joy in it than a lot of the bigger games. I played the latest Assassin’s Creed for an hour and was sick of it; the same goes for Batman: Arkham Knight. Not saying this game is better than them; except I sort of am. I mainly want to bring up the point I spent three or four hours and beat The Minims from start to finish and had fun. This is and even more glaring issue when you compare the fact that those games cost $60 and this game only costs $10. Fun is something I find increasingly lacking in many games that have been released the past couple of years.

The Minims – A New Beginning will be available on Steam April 1^st.

The Minims was developed and published by Beyond Those Hills for the PC, Mac, and iOS platforms on April 1^st, 2016. A digital copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.