Soundtrack: Minit — the sound that gave up on stillness to keep pace with sixty seconds

Intro — the sound that started moving once it gave up on stillness

Minit is an action-adventure Devolver Digital released in 2018 (see Komugi's review; difficulty "Easy," roughly 4 hours to finish). The moment you pick up a cursed sword, you start dying every sixty seconds and restarting from scratch. Only your inventory and your own memory carry over into the next life.

The first thing that plays on the title screen is a dry, 8-bit melody that matches the black-and-white graphics almost too well. The BPM sits somewhere around 140, I'd guess — few rests, built to keep walking forward. It's the work of Finnish composer Jukio Kallio, one of the four people who made the game, alongside Jan Willem Nijman, Kitty Calis, and Dominik Johann (per English Wikipedia, as of September 2026).Minit (Steam store page)

What did a sixty-second limit change about writing the music?

Kallio told Bandcamp Daily he'd originally pictured something quiet and ambient. Then he realized "that won't do when you have a tight time limit woven into the gameplay," and rethought the whole approach (Bandcamp Daily, 2018-05-16).

That rewrite is worth sitting with. Ambient music makes you wait — it drifts and reshapes itself at the listener's own pace. Minit won't wait. Sixty seconds and you're dead, walking the opening steps again. The music has to move before the player does.

What plays instead keeps a rough, lo-fi texture with the rests trimmed away. Kallio has also said he simply likes "raw, lo-fi sound" for its own sake (same interview). A preference born from technical limits happens, here, to fit a completely different limit: sixty seconds.Minit (Steam store page)

Why did the jukebox make one song wear nine different costumes?

Explore far enough and you'll find a jukebox tucked away among the furniture. It offers nine genres — country, pop, speed metal, classical, happy hardcore, stadium rock, jazz, black metal, trance — plus one more, simply titled "The Best Song" (per the Bandcamp track list).

None of these are new compositions. Kallio ran the same theme through an old MIDI soundfont to reskin it nine times over — a self-cover album, essentially. He built in a deliberately bad version too, complete with the hero dancing along to it (Bandcamp Daily). Hiding something pointless and delightful inside a world that never gives you more than sixty seconds — that's a music decision, but it's also exploration design.

Kallio mentioned one more thing that stuck with me: he wrote the ending track around the project's halfway point, and it changed how the whole team felt about the game they were making (same interview). Sometimes the music arrives at the feeling of "finished" before anything else does.

How does the panic of the timer line up with the music's loop?

Playing Minit means running, grabbing, dying, running again. Kallio matched that "solve and reset" tempo with a short loop that leans forward. Because the loop is short, dying just drops you back near the top of it. He expressed urgency through speed rather than a darker key — the same idea I wrote about with La-Mulana, done here in a completely different hand.

Baba Is You makes an interesting contrast. That game softened its music so trial and error never felt like a scolding. Minit does the opposite — it sharpens the music so the panic never hides. Two games built on the same "die and try again" structure, answering with music in almost opposite ways.

Tracks worth hearing

The official release is Jukio Kallio's own MINIT OST (22 tracks), available on both his YouTube channel and Bandcamp.

・[Official] MINIT OST ↗ — the full album, uploaded to the composer's own channel, running from the title theme through every jukebox variation.From the thumbnail of “[Official] MINIT OST” (Jukio Kallio, YouTube)

・Sabasaba Desert ↗ — the exploration-area theme, rests trimmed to match a walking pace.

・Sharp Business ↗ — the theme for the sword-sharpening shop, short and businesslike, playing between errands.

Closing — what I'd steal

Here's what I'd steal. When a game only gives you a short window, reach for a sound that starts moving, not one that waits. Letting go of an attachment to stillness takes some nerve.

One more thing. Dressing one theme in nine different costumes isn't cutting corners — it's placing the same skeleton in nine different rooms, so the surprise multiplies by however many times someone finds it. I'd rather use that trick to multiply the play, not just the track count. Tonight, between pours of coffee, I think I'll go listen to those nine costumes again.

References

・Steam: Minit (official store page, Devolver Digital)

・Jukio Kallio — MINIT OST (official Bandcamp)

・Bandcamp Daily: High Scores — Jukio Kallio's "Minit" Soundtrack Embraces Lo-Fi Sounds (2018-05-16)

・Wikipedia: Minit (dev team, composer credit, award nominations)

・[Official] MINIT OST (Jukio Kallio's official YouTube)