Minoria Is Very Self-Indulgent

I’ve played a bit of Minoria and I don’t dislike it, but I don’t think I’d recommend it, either. I can feel myself giving it a lot of slack it doesn’t deserve, because I kind of sympathize with an imagined creator my subconscious constructed unbidden and now insists was probably the guy who made this thing. I don’t know a goddamn thing about the guy who made this thing, but I’m sympathetic to this hypothetical creator, and that’s biasing me in favor of this game.

So enough about my weird neurotic reaction to it, what is the actual game like? It’s a Metroidvania with the now standard estus-and-bonfires system about a sexy nun fighting evil witches. The sexualization is not subtle, despite generally being somewhat low-graphic this game still took time out to give several characters jiggle physics. I’m not really here for the sexy nun bit. My sympathy is more meta than that: This is a game with the basics of a genre (in this case, Metroidvanias in a post-Hollow Knight world, though the Castlevania influence in particular is very strong) but no real innovation on it besides a self-indulgently fetishistic aesthetic, and that is most probably the first video game I would make (indeed, might make soon) before moving on to other projects.

I wouldn’t expect that game to launch my career. It would be a learning exercise, and I’d make it really self-indulgent because the primary purpose of the game isn’t to have broad market appeal anyway, so why not make the characters all really sexy for me, personally? But as part of that exercise I’d want to make a totally complete and playable game, at which point I may as well toss it onto Steam for $5. Probably a couple of people would like it, the trickle of sales would be better than nothing, and if later games end up really popular, I might end up making more respectable returns on that first game just from people buying my entire backlog.

And hey, Minoria’s considered Very Positive after 1200 Steam reviews, so clearly “Metroidvania where you are a sexy nun” isn’t so niche it can’t find an audience, so who knows, maybe my weird self-indulgent learning exercise of a game would find a niche, too.