The opening describing the four brothers and introducing you to Mo is classic fairytale stuff, the animated kids-cartoon-adventure style of the art gets you thinking this is going to be a nice fun time, and even your first view of a giant (while weird) isn't, you know, awful. The whale actually marks the point where you realise that Minute Of Islands is going to be pretty grim. It makes Minute Of Islands feel like you are simultaneously witnessing the real events inspiring a fairytale, and listening to the story as sanitised by parents and told to children years later.

She does not describe the way the whales intenstines are spilling onto the beach, the bones of its spine are exposed, or how its eyes have been eaten by mangy, one-legged seagulls. But the actual events, and the things you see as you jump and climb around the archipelago Mo lives on, present a jarring contrast to the narration. When the engines break down one day, Mo must brave the surface, checking on her family and growing increasingly paranoid and bitter at her unappreciated sacrifice as she breathes in the spores. The brothers hand-crank the machines to filter and purify the air, which would otherwise become filled with poisonous fungal spores. It tells the story of Mo, a self-taught engineer who lives mostly underground, tending to the bio-mechanical engines operated by four giants - brothers, in fact. Like a lot of stories for kids, the narration is simple, almost sing-song and poetic in tone.

Puzzle-platformer Minute Of Islands sort of feels like a fairytale. Minute Of Islands' puzzle-platforming might not tell a very subtle story, but it's incredibly elegant and drawn in a wonderful way.

Minute of islands plot