60 Seconds! is a game which shows us the theme of survival. And it does it in an unusual way. Our goal as the player is to keep alive an American family while they live in an underground vault trying to live in the time of Apocalypse. Each day is for them a completely new story and brings new challenges. The player has to make moral choices, decides how each member of the family will act and it’s up to him to decide what is the best method of survival for as long as possible.
How to Download 60 Seconds!
The game can be downloaded from GOG.com or from Steam. To start downloading click on the Download button located towards the end of this review.
One Minute of Decisions
In the first phase of the game, we play as Ted, the father. Our task is in the face of the impending doom, to gather as many useful items as possible. These include food, water, but also a radio or a map. It’s also totally up to us how many members of the family we manage to get to the shelter. And one needs to remember that this is an extremely important part of the game which influences the events in the rest of the game.
Ted has a wife and two kids. We need to take into account though that each additional person in our nuclear shelter will make the resources deplete faster. To make all these decisions the player has only 60 seconds of running to and fro in a 3D modeled house in a manic search for the necessary items and family members. It happens so that the action starts one minute before an atomic bomb falls to the ground and explodes (and this is announced by a siren noise). The layout of the house changes with each game which means that every time we need to look for our resources and family in different places.
60 Seconds! – A Lifetime of Decisions
Making for the shelter in time is thus just the beginning of the game. The player’s decisions on how to distribute water and food are based on the daily reports. Further decisions are who to send out to the radioactive wasteland in search of more resources and information.
The reports are one of the key elements in 60 Seconds!. Their correct interpretation affects the physical and psychological well-being of our family. The reports provide us with info who needs the food the most and who is the most thirsty.
It’s also thanks to the reports that we decide who is the best candidate to leave the shelter and look for additional life-saving resources and who needs to stay inside and rest. They also provide an opportunity to contact the world by means of the radio.
The colorful language of 60 Seconds! causes us not to feel overwhelmed by such drastic events as illness or death. Despite the fact that the underlying theme of 60 Seconds! is sad, the game makes up for it with its black humor and comedy elements. Because of that the gameplay is more interesting and can oftentimes completely surprise the player with a turn of events. The player has to deal with varied situations, for example, an invasion of cockroaches and rats who infest the shelter. The player then needs to decide what to do. A mistake can mean that the game’s over.
60 Seconds! is played in the 50s in the 20th century. The developer of the games is a Polish studio Robot Gentleman.
