Miniatures is the kind of game you’ll probably only play once, and at only 35 minutes long, that’s not saying much. But it’s the kind of game you’re likely to think about long after you’ve finished pulling out and pushing its collection of four strange stories. Based around a quartet of miniature objects that are kept in a mysterious treasure box on the game’s menu screen, all of these stand-alone stories share an important theme: they celebrate the strange and unknown corners of childhood imagination and how simple , everyday happenings can stretch. to magical proportions.

Take “The Paludarium,” which sees a boy named Emil pad around his large, austere-looking house while his father prepares the titular tank for Hugo’s lizard. The sparse decor and large, intimidating spaces immediately paint a lonely existence for the young man, but as he moves from room to room, the outdoors gradually begins to seep through the polished concrete. Some gentle puzzles have you piecing together broken objects or finding snails under leaves for Hugo to eat, but when the lizard takes a break, Emil joins him on a surreal chase through the bush, his entire world now reduced to similar square fragments. of reality that cannot be glued back together.

The Last Sandcastle, on the other hand, feels like an ode to Amanita Design’s point and click adventures like Chuchel and Machinarium. Tiny, abstract creatures squeal and scurry around a single litter-strewn sandcastle, and as you poke around its shell-adorned doors and swinging shop signs with your mouse, you’ll begin to assemble a tiny troupe of singers and instruments in the midst of it. It’s a crazy but joyous scene, even as its final moments end with the sharp pain of tragedy.

“Family,” meanwhile, reenacts the dark and arcane magic of assembling furniture (don’t lie, we’ve all been there), with a family of four helping to sort through the screws, nuts and those little wooden nails. in jars, twiddling screwdrivers and turning puzzle-like drawer pieces to no avail. But as tempers flare and patience levels wane, a ferocious scribbled force begins to erupt from every crack, hole and panel of wood put together. It’s the perfect visual analogy for this kind of housework, and you can’t help but feel that something terrible was unleashed in its making.

“House of the Moon”, however, is without a doubt my favorite. This is one that really feels like an interactive picture book, harkening back to the 6 device and the work of developer Patrones & Escondites as you grab and drag the edges of the screen to scroll through this vividly drawn story of a boy on a quest. for his lost mother. As well as traveling from scene to scene, you’ll need to use your mouse to follow parts of the text – putting sliding doors together, for example, or making fruit and lemonade ‘disappear’ by clicking on them. Later, the boy must search for mysterious clouds of blue, fish-scale-like dust with a torch, and players must nudge and investigate each scene with the mouse. And the end, living man, hangs there ominously, as if you’ve opened the door to something great and unfathomable that you don’t fully understand.

It’s these kinds of abrupt yet perfectly angled endings that allow each chapter of Miniatures to stay so strong once they’re done. They’re the kind of big reveals that leave you hungry for more, but also act as the best possible end point to everything you’ve just seen and experienced, because to explain what happens next would be to take away from the magic and wonder saddle. . Instead, they hand over the baton to your own imagination to fill in the blanks, allowing you to draw your own conclusions about what everything might mean and how one object might relate to another. It’s a feeling that goes beyond the simple, light touches of interactivity you’ll find in Miniatures, and the fact that it managed to make such a powerful and evocative impression in just five to ten minutes per story is extraordinary. If that’s not worth half an hour of your time, I don’t know what is.