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In a minute there is time

by Aster profile

Adaptation, Slice of Life
2023

Web Site

(based on 9 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

A gamified love song to J. Alfred Prufrock and T. S. Eliot. Walk through half-deserted streets and muttering retreats, listen to odd conversations, and take in the evening. You only have 60 seconds, but don't worry— in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

A game for SeedComp loosely using the Prufrock seed by Amanda Walker. This game is in a complete and playable form as is, but it is not in its ideal finished form. Keep an eye out for whenever that is!


Game Details


Awards

1st Place, Best Technical; 1st Place, Best Seed Subversion; Entrant, All Games - SeedComp! - 2023

2nd Place (tie), Best Use of Short Form; 35th Place, Best in Show - The IF Short Games Showcase 2023

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Member Reviews

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Number of Reviews: 3
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Foggy Oysters, March 16, 2023
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

“…those were the days of roses, of poetry and prose…”
Tom Waits - Martha

A poem draws the reader into the mood. A loner, anxious, on the sidelines. Choice anxiety, overwhelmed by a myriad options.
The poem, in its closing verse, promises comfort, soothing. A chance to see all options. Choice without choosing for it will all be turned back on itself.

Beautiful well-chosen prose drops you in the middle of a scene. A multitude of scenes, theatre stages next to each other to wander through. The setting is an expansion of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with its oyster bar, its foggy streets,…

But there! There is time. A minute counting back… Pressure to explore!

Until the minute has passed and all is restored, ready to revise.

The repetition renders the sixty seconds pressureless, devoid of tension. In effect, you have a free-floating minute, disconnected from external time and causation.

The result is a narratively empty (isolated from cause-effect, plotless), exploration-rich discovery of relations between locales and passages of text, streetlamp-lit alleys and overheard conversations. An endlessly revising everlasting minute wherein to choose all options and be returned to poetry.

A captivating, mindful experience.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A lovely fusion of TS Eliot with a clever mechanic, March 14, 2023
by MathBrush
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game takes several TS Eliot poems and combines them with some original poetry (which fits in quite well and is lovely).

It uses a stressful mechanic: a giant countdown clock in the background ticks down one minute's worth of time. Once it's over, something special happens (and is a pretty neat trick).

I like the overall vibe T.S. Elliot's work, having encountered it once in high school and again in Graham Nelson's Curses!. There's a lot of parts of his work I dislike, but this game has great chunks in it that work well. The frantic race to see things leads to quick reading and moments of 'huh, what was that??' that were fun. I guess it was the opposite of timed text; instead of the author telling me how long it will take me to read a passage, I get to go at any rate I want through the game with just the overall experience being timed.

I played through three or four restarts until I saw everything I thought I could see. I don't know if there's a canonical ending, but my game ended with a lengthy race against the clock with a piece of actual timed text that made me feel like I was some person at the end of their life just watching the last bits of daily existence before floating away.

Overall, the game is polished, descriptive, has a nice interactive twist, drew me in, and I played it several times.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A voyeur for a minute, January 11, 2024
by manonamora
Related reviews: seedcomp

The entry does an interesting thing with the mechanic, limiting the playthrough to a 60 seconds - though it lets you "rewind" and try as many times as you wish. The games track which passage you visited, making it easier to find the ones you still have left.
I get why the discussions were timed, but they ended up being more frustrating to read through they they should have been because of the timer...

Though that restart may remove all that pressure from the large timer in the background ticking down the minute, it ended up stressing me out so much I found myself clicking aimlessly rather than focussing on the text itself. I had to restart the whole file (because of the tracking formatting) and "hide" the timer from the screen to actually take in the story. The "game" would still end after a minute, making it a bit more sudden, but I wasn't anxiously counting down the seconds...

The story itself is not so much narratively driven but a more exploration or snippets from a third-party perspective. You don't really do anything but look at what is around you, happening regardless of you. A bit of a voyeuristic take, wishing you'd be part of the world you are looking at, but still being incredibly distant from it.

It was an interesting experience.

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In a minute there is time on IFDB

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Polls

The following polls include votes for In a minute there is time:

Outstanding Use of Interactivity in 2023 by MathBrush
This poll is part of the 2023 IFDB Awards. The rules for the competition can be found here, and a list of all categories can be found here. This award is for the an outstanding game of 2023 that felt truly interactive. Voting is open to...

Outstanding Slice of Life Game of 2023 by MathBrush
This poll is part of the 2023 IFDB Awards. The rules for the competition can be found here, and a list of all categories can be found here. This award is for the best Slice of Life game of 2023. Voting is open to all IFDB members....




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