Minato combines classic minesweeper with roguelike elements. Choose from classes with unique abilities, uncover powerful items, and face stages with unexpected twists. Take on challenges, adapt your strategy, and master every run.

M u l t i p l e   c l a s s e s

Start each run by choosing a class with his Artifact, items with unique abilities. Carefully manager its charges, upgrade it and unleash it's power when in need. Every class offers a new way to play and a different path to mastery.

I t e m s   c o m b i n a t i o n s

Find consumables to keep you safe and relics that change the course of a game. Discover new combos every run to progress with ease.

S t a g e   c u r s e s   a n d   b o s s e s

Every few boards, the game raises the stakes. Curses appear to distort the usual rules: limited visibility, empty cells, random numbers. At the end of each world, a boss waits to test how well you’ve adapted.

C l a s s i c   g a m e p l a y ,   n o   r u s h

Beneath all the new ideas, Minato stays true to its roots. There’s no rush: only focus, patience, and the small thrill of clearing the last tile. Whether you like to speedthru board or focus on using a few clicks as possible, every playstyle it's rewarded.

M o d e s   a n d   c h a l l e n g e s

Keep pushing your limits in the endless Mode and by completing challenges for each class.

StatusIn development
PlatformsHTML5, Windows
Rating
Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars
(276 total ratings)
Authornoshuio
GenrePuzzle
Made withUnity
Tags2D, Indie, Minesweeper, Pixel Art, Relaxing, Retro, Roguelike, Short, Singleplayer, Unity
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard, Mouse

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Minato.Win.Latest.zip 59 MB
Minato.Win.0.5.0a.4.zip 48 MB

Development log

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Viewing most recent comments 1 to 40 of 156 · Next page · Last page

This game is incredible, I feel like I'm so much better at minesweeper because of it  

For some reason, during one of my runs with randomized numbers, a "1" (which was probably 7 or 8) appeared as an actual 1, which I don't think should happen; I've been having a lot of fun with this game. Got 100% collection after a few runs. Really great game and looking forward to the future developments of this! I didn't grab the seed for this run, so if there's a way I can check prior run seeds, I'll send it (Boss gave hidden HUD, so I didn't take a picture of it)

my man i've burnt so many office hours on this one

Rather fun concept, the game does seem really snowball-y though, I only really had to try on the early levels, you very quickly reach a point where you're making too much money and have too much health to die.

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2 more bugs I've come across in 5.6.0:

  • Legendary scroll disappears when opening a chest. i got a rare candy so not legendary. While playing I have grown more fond of mimics and chests especially with the tracker artifact that does not flag them. I do think there should be a little pop up that tells you what happened when you click the chest or mimic. Should also be in tutorial. 
  • There is this consumable I have not seen yet despite playing for a couple hours. Could be very bad luck but with some of the gambler builds I've done, it seems unlikely. See screenshot below. Everything else I've been able to find. 

this game is weirdly addicting and very awesome. you are my god. expect blood sacrifice soon.

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the second bug is not true lol i found it. i would never buy it again tho. (soul coins)


i did find another obscure bug: 

Hidden chests don't spawn in until there is a space cleared. Therefore, using the tracker artifact, it is possible to deny them from spawning.

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Best game ever. small bug that I found, if you click fast enough, the :D and >:( faces to switch to easy or hard mode can be flipped (the happy face on the hard and the angry face on the easy).

Will continue playing the game for as long as I live.

Thanks for the report and the lifetime commitment :D

Played to 100% completion! I absolutely adore this game. I agree with other commenters that the chest/mimic mechanics should be polished a bit, and it's definitely not too difficult to break the game at this point -- but overall, it's a really lovely and promising demo and I can't wait to see where it goes!

Thank you :)

Definitely agree. And balance is for wussies :P
As is encountering any mines whatsoever.

idk how this is gonna get nerfed

(+1)

challenge accepted

Just beat the final level on Oracle! …through pure luck. I don't understand the "shuffled numbers" at all. Based on the few that were revealed, I could tell it wasn't 1-to-1 (i.e. all 3's equal 1), was it just totally random? If I didn't have the relic that charged my crystal ball when I took damage, there's no way I would've been able to get past that. What am I missing here?

Numbers are remapped in a fixed way so yeah, if a 3 was represented by a 1, then all 1 had 3 mines arounds. If you have a screenshot or the seed I can take a look if that was not the case

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The best minesweeper game I've played.

It's really fun! I love the additional challenges on the bosses, especially the shuffled numbers.

Will most likely feel slightly unresponsive and quite easy (both normal and hard mode) to experienced minesweeper players.

I will definitely play more of this later and try to follow future developments. 

Thank you!

Is the unresponsiveness related to the dragging of the board or something else?

Partially, but that could be easily fixed with rebinding buttons, which I assume will be implemented later on. 


Biggest issue for me was it sometimes just not registering inputs fast enough. Like when there's a corner 1 with another 1 next to it and I automatically try to place a flag and chord, the flag input just disappears.


Initially thought it was a skill issue, but it's happened pretty often. I'm not discounting the fact it could be a hardware issue on my end, but it felt too consistent for lag. Thankfully it's not too bad and clearance times are not impacted too much (current hard mode pb is 1:45).

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Got it, thanks for the feedback :) I'm definitely looking forward to make the game more speedrun-friendly and I'll look into this. I also got you message about this so I'll get back to you eventually 👍

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fun game but so hard to use flags on Mac. I gave up after losing multiple times due to clicking when I was trying to flag.

I tried the game on a Windows laptop without any problem, it's something related to the right click gesture on a Mac? Keep in mind you could always press "F" to flag a cell :)

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I didn't realize you could use "F", thanks! and yes, the difficulty is that Mac laptops don't have physical left mouse and right mouse buttons, so the only way to right click is either to ctrl + click (which the game doesn't recognize as a right click) or or to click the trackpad with two fingers, which makes it very easy to accidentally left-click when trying to right-click

I may have gotten a bug because even though I found all the bombs it won't progress to the next stage

Check if the mine count is at 0 and not at -1 or worse :)

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I was going for a no flag and I counted the squares I didn't click and it totaled to 0. also, I am pretty sure there were 8 mines and I had 8 squares left

Love many of the new features! The relics are way more interesting then a couple of updates ago, and play way better. 

However, as stated before, for experienced minesweeper players it is a bit easy mode ^^

And you need more room to display relics in the victory screen :P

Thanks for the great updates mate! And have fun with development!

Trying my best to balance the game towards all kind of players, so it's normal for it to be easy for more seasoned minesweeper players :')

Did you also try hard mode? Its presence may not be very obvious UI wise lol

Yeah, this was hard mode.

But I imagine this is a tough game design issue to solve. Basic minesweeper has a 'one-mine-and-you're-dead' design, and even with that and the occasional 50/50 a good player can solve most fields most of the time. 

Relics, artifacts and health all make it easier to get through the game, so they are an excellent way to scaffold the learning and get newer players going. I really think you are doing a great job with making this system powerful and interesting.

However, making the basic game harder is way more difficult, especially without breaking the fundamental joy of the puzzle, or the ability to solve it at all.


I think you're on the right track with the curses, but only a few tap into the basic setup of the game (limited vision or more damage might be a hindrance, but the game is the same). I think the 'let's remove some tiles' works best, in that it forces a veteran player to reassess otherwise familiar setups.
Maybe you can think of more curses (or just variations of the base game) in that line? 
Let me brainstorm some ideas (not yet filtered for quality or practicality): 

  • an irregularly shaped outer edge (diamond, heart, etc)
  • tiles that show the amount of mines in radius 2 instead of radius 1
  • tiles that show the amount of mines in straight directions and not diagonal (so 4 out of 8 possible options)
  • simple '?' tiles, that are in the game but don't give information
  • moving bombs
  • uncertain tiles, that show the amount of bombs +/- 1
  • tiles that indicate a pattern. Like 'I' is that there are two bombs on opposite sides of the tile and 'L' means 3 bombs around 1 corner.
  • tiles that create bombs if the surroundings are left alone for too long
  • tiles that automatically flag bombs next to it when certain conditions are fulfilled
  • a bonus if there is a bomb-moving or bomb-generating system and you get a revealed tile with 8 bombs next to it (another way to make things harder is by adding additional goals/challenges, also like you're doing with the chests)

You probably have thought of many of these already, but I just liked doing a quick game dev exercise for myself ;)

Have fun with development!

Yeah, you got the point. While maintaining the classic gameplay loop, boards will always be solvable without needing any item :)

Even though I want to keep the basic loop close to classic Minesweeper, you are right that curses are probably the key to keeping the game fresh and really taking advantage of all the items. For endless mode, for example, I was thinking of making curses a fixed rule that you carry from the moment they appear throughout the entire run, with maybe an option to choose between curses and more items that interact with them (remove a curse, reroll a curse, ecc).

Honestly, I think this approach could work in normal runs too, making endless mode just a continuation after completing the fixed floors (as I think most players expect it to be).

And I will definitely keep your ideas in mind. As you said, some of them I had already thought of, but having many more ideas to iterate on and test is great!

Thank you for taking the time to give such constructive feedback, I really appreciate it!

was this before the discount was caped at 5?

Definitely one of my favorite new games an am eager to see it grow into a fully realised game. I love how the 50/50s can be worked around with the artifacts and the number swapping curses are brutally fun! My favorite relic is definitely the counting lens as it opens up a whole new avenue of thinking.

I was able to get this absurd run where i could re-roll level rewards 6+ times and choose 14 different items. probably totaled 200 re-rolls.


my one suggestion is that there is an endless mode after the end (eventually where minesweeper just gets impossible in vanilla) that is the true test of a certain build, similar to the games' inspiration: Balatro.



a couple bugs I found in 0.5.6: (sorry i got no screenshots)

  • when choosing level rewards with multiple rare candies, the game tries to add more after the skip button, easiest way to recreate this is with 2 rare candies for legendary relic level rewards. issue would solve itself as more relics get added but maybe there should be a limit on stackable relics such as the candy and the guiding flame. 

  • some boss curses assume the game is in "do not count exploded mines" mode. example: when a bomb is destroyed in a 3x3 explosion, that bomb is no longer visible to surrounding blocks. i also think that exploded bombs should be more visible and look more like flags

  • this is speculation but i don't think the pure and soft blessings work as intended. The only curse nerf i encountered was 5x5 vision instead of 3x3. i like the idea of specific nerfs for each curse and each blessing though. 


overall this game is so fun! can't wait to see where its heading. keep up the good work! 

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

About your points:

  • as you said the issue will eventually resolve itself as more items will be added, and I don't think adding a hard limit to those stackable relics is a reasonable solution, but decreasing their spawn rate after you reach a certain number could work, I'll look into it
  • the counting mode should be working fine, so I think the problem is exactly the fact that you can't distinguish from exploded mines and exploded cells; I already planned to use different sprites for them so that should solve it
  • I'll try to test them

Thanks for playing and I hope you stick around to check out future releases :)

I forgot to add that endless mode will be coming in the final release :)

epic sauce. 

my main source of duplicating relics was constantly re-rolling for the duplication consumable which is much cheaper than buying a relic. Keep having fun coding this!

Love the idea, combining two of my favorite time sinks from differnet eras of my life (roguelikes and Minesweeper)! I did feel like the game either never gets too hard, or takes too long to ramp up. I played for about an hour waiting for it to feel less like normal Minesweeper but I could still beat every level by playing normally and the powerups felt too passive in the sense that I wouldn't notice their impact and often forgot to use them to my advantage for the extra goals like minimum clicks, time and whatnot. I think the game is great and love the music and artstyle but it would benefit greatly from becoming a little bit more hectic a little bit faster.

I totally get your point, and initially the game was way harder :) but since the game rised in popolarity, many people found it extremely frustating, so I tried to adjust it accordingly to make the best experience for everyone. There's currently an hard mode unlocked for each class when completing a run in normal mode that should give some challenge, and more challenging modes will surely come in the future. Overall the game right now gives you a lot of resources to work with, I'm still trying to fine tuning that

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Totally understandable! Balancing a game is really difficult, especially with so many random elements and different levels of player familiarity with this type of puzzle. I think the difficulty is actually great, but maybe it could ramp up just a little bit faster so that the powerups are more necessary? 

In any case, great job! Amazing game that I'm going to wishlist on Steam, good luck with development!

(+1)

I love the game, but I think some thing are kinda needed, like a better way to know where chests are. chests are kinda like things that are like "hey, you were an idiot and clicked on a spot with a mine, but don't worry I'm actually a chest!" and then give you a relic (and are sometimes more like "hey you clicked on a mine, but thats okay I'm a chest! SIKE IM A MIMIC!").

something i forgot to mention. you shouldnt be able to get Coined Heart as an option on the first level. I have gotten it first as a choice when I couldnt get it too many times >:(

Chests as a mechanic will be improved on for sure, with more relics interacting with them :)

yippee!

I found an absolutely ridiculous seed lmao. 000064DBBA29 , I had TWELVE HEARTS (and still lost on the second stage))

could you double the minimum time for accessibility reasons? or at least have a setting or relic that does that?

Ye I already planned to adjust these objectives, should be reworked in the upcoming 0.6 release :)

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I will say, (speaking as a playtester of sorts) that the times I typically get when playing good have constantly been twice the estimated time.

it also seems a bit off-balanced with there being so many relics and consumables that help you with reducing click count and not taking damage, (and I'll even count the radar as helping you go flagless, since it doesn't actually count as "using flags"), but pretty much only a single  relic that helps you save time.

Thanks for the feedback; I agree that relics to help you reaching the objectives should be equally available, so I'll try to add more options for the time limit one

I mean they don't need to be equally available, just that there should be strategies that make any singular one of them easy in the late game (they can even still be mutually exclusive, it's just that ). 

you could also just make it an accessibility feature in the settings, since probably 60-80% of people would find the time goal to be just right, and that it would be too easy for such people if you lowered it (it would be an honor-type system though, in terms of people not using it when they don't need it, but I think people would respect it, kinda like assist mode giving you extra life in Mario odessy)

timing is a notoriously hard thing to adjust for, because you don't know how long people will take on each step while thinking about things, especially on as short of a timescale you have here. The times it does work are usually when a predictable, repreatable interation is initated by the player, allowing them to take the time they need to adjust to it.

I don't think I've actually encountered it yet, but it would be great if there was some 50/50 protection if there isn't already. Otherwise 10/10 Wishlisted.

Mh, I can't guarantee that I'll add it for sure but I'll look into it, as it's something that frustrates most of the players even if they have a gazillion hearts lol I'll try to reach for that 10/10 :)

a lot of mechanics in the game are meant to compensate for the fact that you might get 50/50s. the game already has 50/50 protection.

While I agree with you (since that was also how the game was born, giving you tools to bruteforce a minesweeper board), I get a lot of complaints about it so an item to grant that ability could be added without any downside really, but I'll probably need to add it in the starting pool of relics of the base game modes; "Hawk eye" was added to the game for the same reason

it would make an excellent sacrificial relic to destroy with many of the consumables that make you destroy a relic, since most of the time it would be easily compensated for by simply keeping a charge handy on your artifact. Something like "Hawk eye" is not always so easily done away with, since you use it on every board, and depending on the state of your artifact, you might need special measures to compensate for it, especially against a boss or something.

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your artifact is 50/50 protection

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so, even though it doesn't count as a click, Safe Start (the flag relic) still counts it as a click? that seems like it should be a synergy.

I'll look into it, thanks for the report

be careful, the combination of the relics that make your flags not count as clicks and your chords not count as clicks allow you to basically go clickless, so you'll need to account for that.

also, I should say, I do really like the way it works right now. it makes you have to think strategically of how to maximize coverage, and highly synergizes with bomb detonation effects. (personally I try to find 1's with many cells around them and cord them)

honestly, I might be a bit disappointed if you changed it.

I think the threshold is fine, but I see how some cheap relics could make it totally trivial

I wasn't  talking about the threshold, just the "some cheap relics make trivial" part (and my personal strategy to maximize synergy)

(+1)

Hi, I played your game and made a video about it. Just wanted to let you know.

(+1)

Thank you! I appreciate it :)

(+1)

Holy goated run

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cleared in in quite literally the minimum possible number of clicks (edit: w/o items that reduce starting clicks, whoops)

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incorrect. using the relic does not count as a click, making 0 easily possible (and quite easy with a certain item)

yeah. i realised that a bit after i posted it, plus i've gotten negative click counts with some items, lol

 well you did say you weren't counting items that reduce starting clicks, so with that restriction, 0 is the minimum.

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There's no way to find chests if you miss the chest indicators at the start of the run, as they stop appearing later since they are common items

(+1)

You're right, I'll try to better balance the chests mechanic in the next releases :)

(+2)

I played this some months ago and i really like the updates since then! :) cool game

This game's name reminds me of a specific character from Gundam Build Fighters Try.... I wonder who it could be......

(+1)

So ummm, I may have gon a bit overboard with the infinite gold glitch and the game died when I clicked on this gigantic map TwT at least we now know what the limitations are

This is what popped up lol

Unmatched levels of greedImage

I'm going to say it: dice is the most powerful artifact ever

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I love this game so much its minesweeper and rougelikes combined :) two of my favorite things

I think i may have found a bug?

if you beat the game then reload, you can continue but you get stuck because you cant reselect the final boss


Definitely a bug :) thanks for the report. I'll fix it as soon as I can

(+1)

Super appreciate the many updates. It's noticeable :]

Deleted 75 days ago
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i think i have made the most op build for this game XD, you must keep upgrading your relic as oracle (for me it was to [reveal 20 tiles]) and get safe start aswell as mana heart so you can use your ultimate click a mine *get defended* use ultimate *get defended* and repeat till you win

im worried this is too overpowered :D???

You must have not seen the dice xD 

(+1)

sometimes having problems with which description shows up, haven't tested out much nor do I know how it works, but it seems to be the top two relics here have the description of the third. Love your game <3 

(cursor is over the eye, showing description for the Supply Voucher, the third relic from the top.)

This was a recurring problem during development, I thought it was gone for good. Does it happen frequently? I'll try to look into it further

Is it normal to play minesweeper with two mines?

WOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!

i've got all the relics and im only missing 6 of the consumables

now 2

Love this Game! I've spent hours in the latest Windows release. A couple of notes:

1) Could the present level, perhaps an x/9 or even a road map, be displayed at all times? I can forget which stage I'm at when selecting things in the store or stage rewards, and that knowledge would inform what rewards I select. It also get confusing when the relic lowering stage difficulty is applied, and a couple of times the game ended when I thought I still had a level or 2 to go.

2) The number shuffle curse is by far the hardest, in part because sometimes it bugs out and a few tiles seem to keep their original values, not the shuffled number. If I find this again, I'll grab a screenshot.

  1. I'll keep this in mind for the next release, as it'll change the map once again x) but this time will be something different, not just a layout change
  2. if you mean that a cell with one mine near still remains a 1, yeah that can happen, I purposely leave it that way to confuse more, so it's working ahah

Thanks for playing and for the suggestions! I hope you'll stick around and enjoy the future releases too :)

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Diabolical!

Okay, so I spent 3 hours reseeding for the perfect seed, which I eventually got, and was able to get 10 discount things, making everything cost 1 coin, so I only worried about paying for rerolls. I ultimately acquired 10 Challenger tokens in one shop, and the game promptly crashed when I left it. I tried again on the same seed past the shop, and at the next shop, I got 23 tokens. Crashing again. PLEASE fix this. I want to play a 2000 by 2000 square board. Thanks!

I'll look into it, I should be able to release the next patch this weekend. Can you tell me if this was in the web version or Windows?

The glitch occurred on the Windows version of the game

(+2)

I love this game to the moon and back – I keep coming back to it whenever I have 5 spare minutes and always have a good time. 😊

I think I’ve found a small bug with the level targets:

  • I cleared the board with a single click.

  • The result shows time: 0 seconds and clicks used: 1 (as seen on the left).

  • However, the game shows a target clicks: 1, and it’s not marked as completed.

  • The time target is correctly marked as completed, since I got 00:00.

Because I must use at least one click to clear the level, a “target clicks: 1” that requires strictly less than 1 click is impossible to achieve.

Maybe the click target check should be “less than or equal to” instead of “strictly less than”?
I'll post a screenshot in the next comment since I hit the chars limit.

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Thanks for the feedback! You're completely right, I'll fix this problem in the next patch :) and thanks for keep playing! It still amazes me that people are enjoying this so much

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Keep up the good work!

YOU FOOL! CRYSTAL BALL GO! 

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