In a world where every other game is a roguelite—a genre where failure means starting again from the beginning, sometimes with incremental improvements—Minit feels like a sharp, pointed response. This is a fully-fledged pixel RPG in which you only live for a minute at a time.

Presented in deliberately super-low-key aesthetics, Minit offers very basic white pixel art on an entirely black background, natively displayed at a resolution of 320 x 240. You play as a sort of duck-like thing who, after finding a cursed magical sword, can now only live for a minute, awaking upon death back in his home, the world reset around him. Think Groundhog Day played on fast-forward. Oh, but you keep anything you find as you go.

Within these extreme confines, you need to explore the world around you in minute chunks (that’s a minute/minute pun for you, you’re welcome), attempting to discover a way to escape this curse.

Early on, you meet a s-l-o-w talking turtle, who will take an entire lifespan to finish his sentence and give you some information you need. This is instructive as to how the game is played, with players using some runs to find something new to explore and then subsequent lifetimes to work out how best to explore it. To get to the end of the turtle’s sentence, you need to run at full pelt to him from the moment you wake up. To get through a blind maze, you’re going to need to eliminate all the mistaken directions in a series of brief existences.

Thankfully, the game has smartly placed spawn points that enable you to begin a new minute where you last saved, which becomes a crucial part of the process.

While this may make some think of Outer Wilds, the 22-minute time-loop game set in space, or Arkane’s Deathloop, it’s notable that Minit came out in 2018, before either more famous title. It is, of course, far more inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and its three-day loop—except reduced down to minuscule form.

Minit was created by a very small team including Jan Willem Nijman, the JW of legendary indie developers Vlambeer, creators of Nuclear Throne, alongside the amazing Kitty Calis and Dominik Johann as well as composer Jukio Kallio (Fall Guys). A similar team also created the fantastic Disc Room a couple of years later, as well as many of their own projects.

Given the brevity of each loop in Minit, it’s remarkable that the game can take a good four hours to fully explore, demonstrating that there’s a lot more depth here than its black-and-white, simple aesthetic design might imply. It’s a bunch of fun to regularly go from flailing desperation to focused determination as you reach each new area, solve the next challenge, and open the game up even further. Plus, there just aren’t enough games where you get to play as a duck-like thing.