Some of these games feel a little redundant to write about because they're popular games and you've already heard about and played them. Take this game. Minit's a couple years old, has ports on consoles and was nominated for a bunch of awards, so you're probably already aware of what this, for instance. I doubt I'm treading any new ground with this one.
Minit is a black-and-white pixel adventure game of finding a sword and going out to solve puzzles and find secrets. It's fairly top-down Zelda-like with a Majora's Mask-esque gimmick of having to restart your life over and over with key items and progress kept between "runs". The game and world feels nice, I'm not sure what to really say about it, so how about I get to the main question, the one that the game tries to sell itself on:
Is the 60 second gimmick enriching? Do I feel like exploring and puzzle solving in 60 second chunks made the game better? Did it feel like 60-second lives mechanic was thoroughly explored?
Honestly? Not especially, no.
The thing about puzzles is that I'm going to get stuck. I'm going to want to stare at things and try stuff out to see if I'm missing anything. Minit's puzzles are on the simpler side, but there's still enough there that I wanted to take a bit of time on them. And then I die and have to return to the area. Exploration, too, needs to be thorough. Minit has a lot of hidden secrets, and also interactables that don't actually matter. So, looking over all the sprites just in case seems like a good idea. And then I die and have to return to the area. To make matters worse, only a handful of times did the minute timer actually mean something for solving a puzzle - that is, the fact I was on a timer to death only majorly influenced a puzzle a couple of times, which is odd for such a central gimmick.
In an ideal world, the 60 second loops would be small bite sized bits of adventure, blending into perhaps planning a route to get to somewhere in time. In practice, I was continually killed and given the setback of returning to checkpoint for not really doing anything "wrong" - my biggest crime being taking my time in a genre that really wants me to do that. There's only so many times I can spend 15 seconds blandly walking to a place to continue exploring before I wonder what's gained out of doing those 15 seconds a dozen times.
The follow up question would be if the game would be better if the feature was removed. I would say probably, but with some adjustments. It would certainly kill some the frustration I felt when I just wanted to roam. The game itself would likely be shorter, when it's already a brief game - my playtime was about 50 minutes, and I see 1-2 hours for more thorough players.
None of this to say Minit is a bad game. I'm just not convinced that its primary Thing - a 60 second countdown every life - was applied completely thoughtfully. Seeing as how it's the main selling point, it was worth writing about. Minit is still an easy to pick up game with solid exploration and a lot of charm baked into its simplistic look.
I enjoyed it. Minit is a good game.