“Minishoot’ Adventures is a delight, questionable apostrophe use in the title and all,” we wrote back in 2024, in a roundup of the year’s great crop of metroidvanias. Compared to its contemporaries Animal Well and Nine Sols, Minishoot’ Adventures didn’t get a ton of attention two years ago, but it was a realhead’s hidden gem pick for 2024 thanks to its clever amalgamation of ideas. “Exploring Zelda-like dungeons as an increasingly mighty little spaceship is such an inspired genre mash-up that I keep having to pause the game to applaud and throw flowers at it,” PC Gamer contributor Abbie Stone said.
“Lovely. I’d play that,” is how I presume a normal person would react to reading about Minishoot’ Adventures.
Article continues below
It turns out SoulGame Studio developer Séverin Larose, one half of the indie duo that developed Minishoot’ Adventure, is not a supervillain who chose confounding grammar as his instrument of destruction.
“To be fair, it was not an entirely thought out process, it was more like: ‘I need to type something in the Project Name field of Unity, let’s go for Minishoot’, it looks cute.’ As the development enthusiasm grew, with the little ship flying around, it quickly became a Saturday morning cartoon theme song from the ’90s with lyrics going somewhere along the lines of Minishoooot’, YEAH, Minishooooot’ TATATA TA TA.
“At this point, as you may guess, we were far beyond suspecting the underlying grammatical catastrophe we had set in movement. Then we announced it. Then we got a few timid questions about the apostrophe but answered confidently ‘That’s just Minishoot’! It’s quirky but it’s how it is.’ Then it released and the influx of interrogation started! We couldn’t have foreseen the amount of confusion we would generate worldwide… In the end I’m afraid it’s only a combination of carelessness and French enthusiasm.”
When Larose and his partner Adrien Sèle started development, Minimalist Shooter Adventure was meant to be a short and “abstract” game with graphics made of simple, unadorned geometric shapes; it didn’t need a creative title. But as the short development stretched to four years, they needed a nickname, “and the tiny mistake became big.”
Not so secret
SoulGame has actually addressed this question before, in a 2022 Steam forum post—I may have been gassing you up a bit, reader, in calling this an investigation. But to be honest, the explanation of the title being “a contraction” was so baffling I knew I needed a more complete answer.
Perhaps the apostrophe was an ingenious move—a compelling mystery that drew the eyes of gamers who would’ve otherwise ignored a more pedestrianly named Minishoot Adventures. Larose told me that when the metroidvania launched on Steam, they predicted based on wishlists it would sell 10,000 copies in its first year. Instead it did that in its first two days, and has since gone on to sell 140,000 more.
The Switch launch has also been a success, hitting third place on the US bestseller list at some point. At about 20,000 console sales so far the game is still just a modest hit, but Larose still says that’s “really great” for their tiny studio. And he expects the long tail of sales to be strong.
SoulGame Studio’s next game won’t be a Minishoot’ sequel, Larose told me, as it would be “way too taxing” to make two back-to-back. But he did sign off his email with a revelation that plunged an ice cold dagger of fear into my heart.
“I want to use this opportunity to reassure fans by confirming that there will be indeed an apostrophe in the next title we’ll publish,” he said. “Hopefully in a spot that makes sense. Cheers!”