A high-pressure puzzle game where you only have 5 minutes to solve all the puzzles, otherwise you explode! Throughout the game, you are exploring a spaceship looking to collect codes, unlock doors, and power things up.

This one is a bit of a short side, but it’s kind of nice just to have a game you can quickly jump into for a couple of moments at a time. As each attempt at the game itself only lasts five minutes. While the puzzles you attempt to solve remain the same, the solutions change with each attempt. So, there is no cheating, getting a door key, and running off to skip a bunch of them!

You start on the bridge of the ship. If only you knew the code to enter into the main computer that makes life easy. While you could try brute forcing the code, there are just too many combinations to try in a five-minute time limit. You are just better off running to the first puzzle.

Thankfully, the first puzzle stays the same. It’s one of those don’t touch the walls with the ball and get it to the other side of the maze. A couple of puzzles in this game are maze-based.

A big part of cutting down the amount of time you spend doing this is learning the layout of the ship itself. As with each puzzle you finish. You get told that a door has unlocked, something got powered on, or perhaps you were given a code to enter the couple of keypads.

The first few attempts, at least for me, even after getting some quick solutions, were just finding where to go next. Thankfully, the ship itself i not massive. However, some things, like having to ride an elevator, take time. The time that you find yourself rather short on.

Like a lot of times when first facing a puzzle, whatever time you have remaining tends to get spent trying to work out how it works. Thankfully, the next puzzle has a clear trick to it once you have done it a couple of times. The others are not so kind.

As this puzzle itself, you just need to rotate the pieces around. Until you connect one ball at the top with a series of pieces forming a line to the next. Would it not be nice if this were the solution the next time around? Well, it won’t be as next time you will have to find a different route to get through.

There are also some memory trial-and-error puzzles. They can get a bit frustrating. When you fail to guess the next section, the whole puzzle resets. As you can see with this puzzle here, you need to connect the dots correctly to the next section. Picking the wrong path resets it. With about a dozen or so connections needed to connect you to the end.

That is a lot of starting over. Trying to remember while under the time crunch of minutes or even seconds remaining. Knowing very well that whatever solution you worked out this time won’t be the same in the next run.

Final Thoughts

Once the timer runs out, you get a nice explosion to marvel at. This also sums up my mood quite well when the run is going great, but you hit a snag while trying to solve one of the puzzles that eats up so much time. You just know you might as well hit the reset button and try again.

Overall, while a bit on the short side. It is fun to just jump into a game for a short while. Get to experience something new and move on to other things. For those looking for a short puzzle game, this one might be for you.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about 5 Minutes Until Self-Destruction.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.