Miniatures is a dreamy, interactive picture book with strange, dark stories that I would have loved to have had as a child

Miniatures is the kind of game you’ll probably only play once, and with a running time of just 35 minutes, that’s not really saying much at all. But it’s the kind of game you’ll probably keep thinking about long after you’ve finished poking and prodding its collection of four strange stories. Based around a quartet of miniature objects, kept in a mysterious treasure chest on the game’s menu screen, these standalone stories all share one major theme: they celebrate the strange and unknowable corners of a child’s imagination, and how simple, everyday events can ignite . to magical proportions.

Take “The Paludarium,” in which a boy named Emil walks through his large, austere-looking house while his father prepares the tank for his pet lizard Hugo. The sparse furnishings and large, intimidating spaces immediately portray a lonely existence for the young boy, but as he moves from room to room, the outdoors gradually begins to seep through the polished concrete. Some soft puzzles require you to stick broken objects together or find snails under the leaves for Hugo to eat, but when the lizard escapes, Emil joins him on a surreal chase through the undergrowth, with his entire world now reduced into similar square fragments. of reality that cannot be glued back together.

‘The Last Sand Castle’, on the other hand, feels like an ode to Amanita Design’s point-and-click adventures as Chuchel and Machinarium. Small, abstract creatures squeak and run around a single, junk-strewn sandcastle, and as you carefully examine the shell-adorned doors and waving signboards with your mouse, you begin to assemble a tiny group of players and instruments in the center of it. It’s a crazy, yet joyful scene, even if the final moments end with a sharp stab of tragedy.

‘Familiar’, meanwhile, reenacts the dark, arcane magic of assembling flatpack furniture (don’t lie, we’ve all been there), with a family of four who all help sort out screws, nuts and those little wooden pegs in pots, rotating screwdrivers and rotating puzzle-like drawer pieces, to no avail. But as tempers waver and patience wanes, a ferocious, scribbled force begins to erupt from every crack, every hole, and every sloppily assembled wooden panel. It’s the perfect visual analogy for that kind of household chore, and you can’t help but feel like something terrible was unleashed in the making of it.

However, ‘The House of the Moon’ is undoubtedly my favorite. This is the book that really feels like an interactive picture book, harking back to the likes of Device 6 and the work of developer Patrones & Escondites as you grab and drag the edges of the screen to scroll through this vividly drawn story of a boy searching for his lost mother. In addition to traveling from scene to scene, you also have to use your mouse to follow parts of the text, for example sliding doors together or making fruit and lemonade ‘disappear’ by clicking on them. Later, the boy must search for mysterious clouds of blue, fishscale-like dust with his torch, and players must nudge and investigate each scene with their mouse. And the ending, man lives, it just hangs there ominously, as if you’ve opened the door to something vast and unfathomable that you don’t quite understand.

It’s these kinds of abrupt, yet perfectly pitched endings that make each chapter of Miniatures linger so strongly when they’re all over. They’re the kind of big revelations that leave you hungry for more, but also act as the best possible culmination of everything you’ve just seen and experienced, because to describe what happens next would be to strip it of its magic and wonder. . Instead, they pass the baton to your own imagination to fill in the gaps, allowing you to draw your own conclusions about what it all might mean and how one object might relate to another. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the simple and light interactivity found in Miniatures, and the fact that it managed to make such a strong and evocative impression in just five to ten minutes per story is extraordinary. If that isn’t worth half an hour of your time, I don’t know what is.