Grade: B+
Some of us lost a lot of our early twenties to a god-game called Dungeon Keeper, in which you built and maintained a dungeon and filled it with tricks, traps and monsters to kill the goody-two-shoes heroes who periodically tried to invade it. Minos is a descendant of that game, and a welcome one. Similar isometric projection, similar vibe, similar moral outlook.
You control the minotaur (not very bull-like, is this Asterion, though: more of a faun as imagined by a thirsty anime fan) and, with the help of Daedalus, prepare your labyrinth to see off successive waves of invaders who pour in without so much as a by-your-leave. It’s in what gamers would call ‘roguelite real-time strategy tower-defence territory’, and normies would call ‘the in-laws coming for the weekend’ territory.
In boring old real life, it’s all last year’s Ferrero Rocher and regifted Pinot Noir. But wouldn’t you rather be able to set invaders on fire, impale them on spikes or drown them in a cloud of poison gas? Minos has you covered. Levelling up gives you access to unexpected synergies and ever more fiendish traps with which to squish the goodies, and the building phase lets you reshape the labyrinth to make sure they step haplessly on every single one. Splat! Splat! Eat it, losers.
It takes some getting the hang of – the controls can be a bit fiddly, the difficulty ramps up quite fast and if there’s a way of rotating your view of the labyrinth I couldn’t find it. But if you’re a thwarted architect, or a thwarted sadist, here’s a game that will while away several very happy hours.
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