Meet Ted, a family man with a cozy home, a loving family, and a fallout shelter. On a peaceful day, you suddenly hear alarms and have exactly one minute to grab everything useful in your home and jump into a fallout shelter located inside the house. Besides the helpful items, you also have to pick up your family. Each item takes up space and you must empty what you collect into the shelter, then go back for more. It’s a chaotic start to the apocalypse, as you run into and break things, frantically trying to get everything that’s useful. Once you’re safe inside the shelter, you try to survive for as long as you can. Using your limited resources, you must feed and give water to your family as the days progress. There are times you can gain more equipment not earned from the initial grab-and-go mini-game from the start. Your goal is to survive long enough to meet a positive conclusion, usually in the form of being rescued by the military. However, there are a ton of outcomes in 60 Seconds! that will determine if you survive or perish.

Here’s what I liked:

Another Day — The actual mini-story branches can be pretty entertaining. You have the choice to make decisions that end up with random results, making it a game of rolling the dice. If you send someone out to look for food and don’t give them the right tools, they could fail at bringing back anything valuable. It being a game of chance makes it feel like each decision you make can be impactful. It wouldn’t be the same if you knew every outcome of your decisions. This makes every playthrough truly feel different than the last. Trying to make it as many days as you can is a challenge, especially on the harder difficulties where you have even fewer resources. It can still be fun, even with failing, to see how many days you can last.

Humor — While in the bunker, life seems to have become a boring game of survival. Your choices in how you approach obstacles can end in disaster, but typically it’s almost funny. Not laugh out loud hilarious but comical. If a family member gets sick and dies, their corpse can turn into a skeleton and the family is still sitting around it as if nothing happened. It’s one less tool for you to send for supplies, yet one less mouth to feed. The misery the family endures is almost bound to happen at any moment. I don’t know why, but I really like the way the family is void of emotion. They never have happy expressions and if left bored too long, they go crazy. It really helps set the tone of a gloomy apocalypse.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

No Soup for You — The family will become thirsty or hungry and you need to give them these things for survival. There will be a line of text that tells you how much they need water or soup. The problem I had with this was there was no pattern. You never really know when they’ll need these things or how often. I’ve had one family member need to eat every day for a few days, while another I could feed every three. If there really was a situation with rations, then the family would have a schedule of when they ate so they could make it last longer. It was just really annoying feeding someone only for them to need more food the next day. I would prefer it to be they need soup every two days and water every day or something similar.

That Darn Cat — I love cats, I even have one myself. But for some reason, I was constantly having this animal show up. It ruined my chances of getting the dog. It’s like you have to plan to avoid it. I kept getting stuck with it, meaning I was repeating the same story sequences over and over. There are a few ways to get it which is too many. It leads to boring replays that cancel out other routes you haven’t been able to see. It also has a few branches that lead to various endings, which made matters worse because I really felt like I was wasting time. I didn’t want it showing up, and it did every time making the whole “random encounter” part seem minimal. This animal was added as an update. I guess the good news is that scenarios can be added to entice you to go back to the game later on.

A Minute to Win it — A frantic grab game that has you set out to obtain whatever you can in a limited time. It’s a bit awkward as you run into things and scramble to loot enough items to make your playthrough easier. The biggest issue I had was needing to grab the family. They take up a lot of space and technically they should be running to the shelter by themselves. For a father who is so prepared as to have a shelter, he sure missed the opportunity to instruct his family what to do in case of an emergency. There are even challenges that focus on doing this sequence, but they all seem ridiculously difficult because of the time limit. Is it fair to complain about a “challenge”? Maybe not but it’s not a feature I enjoyed visiting.

Wrap-up

It’s a different concept to have a mini-game that sets up your playthrough. You try your best to get what you need and can alter your experience with specific items. There’s a lot of decisions that impact your survival and it’s always a hit or miss. Such is life. While you’re in control of the decision making process you’re not always in control of the outcome. All in all, it’s a pretty well-made story with great dark humor. The biggest issue is longevity. There is a lot of replay value but it gets a bit tedious because you can survive and win, but the motivation to keep playing is only to see different endings and outcomes. It’s relatively short and you’re making quick decisions, usually just one per day followed by reading. It has some great ideas but it might not be something you play for more than a few hours.

Score: Reader’s Choice

60 Seconds! was published by and developed by Robot Gentlemen on Xbox One. It was released on March 6, 2020, for $9.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.