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6 reviews · 3 essays
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Soundtrack: Minit — the sound that gave up on stillness to keep pace with sixty seconds
Minit resets you to zero every sixty seconds, cursed sword and all. Composer Jukio Kallio originally imagined something quiet and ambient, then realized a hard time limit woven into the gameplay wouldn't allow it, and rethought the whole approach. The game's hidden jukebox recostumes one melody into nine genres, from country to black metal. Doremi listens for how the sixty-second panic and the music's tempo line up.
Solving the Time Loop — Designing Games Where Knowledge Is the Only Save Data (from Majora's Mask to Outer Wilds)
A time loop is a machine for making knowledge the only save data. From Majora's Mask's three days to Outer Wilds' twenty-two minutes and The Sexy Brutale's twelve hours, a design reading of loop games as observation puzzles extended along the axis of time.
Soundtrack: The Sexy Brutale — a masquerade that tells time by ear
The music Matt Bonham and Tim Cotterell wrote for The Sexy Brutale is electro-swing that conjures a 1920s masquerade — but underneath, it is the most precise clock in the mansion. It differs from wing to wing, tightens toward each scheduled murder, and resets with the loop at midnight. How a time-loop mystery and its music mesh, and how to steal the 'let the sound measure the hour' idea for your own writing. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Related reviews
GNOSIA
A single-player take on Werewolf: find the Gnosia hiding among the crew using nothing but discussion and votes. Up to fifteen crew members are redealt into different roles each loop, and a time loop sends you through the same voyage again and again. From Petit Depotto.
deductionnarrative-puzzlevisual-novelMinit
A small black-and-white top-down adventure in which a curse ends every life after sixty seconds and sends you home. Only the items you picked up and the new houses you found carry over, so each minute reaches a little further than the last. Made by four developers including Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman, published by Devolver Digital.
adventurepuzzletime-loopThe Forgotten City
A first-person mystery-adventure set in an underground Roman city bound by a golden rule — if one person sins, everyone dies — where you relive a single day through a time loop, unravelling the city's doom through conversation and moral choice. By Modern Storyteller.
mysteryadventureinvestigationThe Sexy Brutale
At a masked ball, the guests are murdered one by one by the mansion's staff across a twelve-hour loop that resets each midnight. As a bystander in a bloodstained mask you eavesdrop from the shadows and wind the clock back and forth to read the choreography of each killing, then intervene before the victim dies. An isometric mystery puzzle by Cavalier Game Studios and Tequila Works.
puzzlemysteryadventureOverboard!
A reverse detective game aboard a 1930s ocean liner: as Veronica, who has just pushed her husband overboard, you have a few hours before the ship docks to bury the evidence and pin the crime on another passenger. Lie, bribe, seduce, or murder again — inkle (80 Days, Heaven's Vault) build countless perfect crimes from a handful of verbs.
mysterydetectivetime-loopTwelve Minutes
A real-time, top-down thriller in a single apartment: you are killed, snap back to the moment you opened the door, and loop the same twelve minutes, using only what you have learned to break the cycle. Luis Antonio builds dread from few verbs and one room.
mysterynarrativetime-loop
