Miniatures is the kind of game you’re only likely to play once, and at just 35 minutes long, that’s not really saying very much at all. But it is the kind of game you’re likely to keep on thinking about long after you’ve finished poking and prodding its collection of four strange tales. Based around a quartet of miniature objects, which are kept inside a mysterious treasure box on the game’s menu screen, these standalone stories all share one important theme: they celebrate the weird and unknowable corners of childhood imagination, and how simple, everyday occurrences can balloon to magical proportions.
MiniaturesDeveloper: Other Tales InteractivePublisher: Other Tales InteractivePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, Itch.io), Nintendo Switch and iOS
Take ‘The Paludarium’, which sees a boy called Emil pad around his large, austere-looking home while his dad readies the titular tank for his pet lizard Hugo. The sparse décor and large, intimidating spaces immediately paint a lonely kind of existence for the young lad, but as he moves from room to room, the outdoors gradually starts to seep through the polished concrete. Some gentle puzzles have you piecing together broken objects or finding snails beneath the leaves for Hugo to eat, but when the lizard makes a break for it, Emil joins him on a surreal chase through the undergrowth, his entire world now reduced to similar square fragments of reality that cannot be glued back together again.
Miniatures – Release Date Trailer Watch on YouTube
‘The Last Sand Castle’, on the other hand, feels like an ode to Amanita Design’s point and click adventures like Chuchel and Machinarium. Tiny, abstract creatures squeak and scuttle around a single, junk-strewn sand castle, and as you gently probe its shell-adorned doors and swinging shop signs with your mouse, you’ll start assembling a teeny tiny band of players and instruments in the middle of it. It’s a daft, yet joyful scene, even if its final moments end with the sharp pang of tragedy.