The most baffling apostrophe in gaming history: a PC Gamer investigation

"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.

"That apostrophe is going to haunt my dreams," is how I (not a normal person) reacted to Minishoot' Adventure. And it has haunted me, for two years now. This is my personal Papyrus: a creative choice so brazen and inexplicable my mind cannot grasp it no matter how many times I look at it.

Why isn't it Minishoot's? Or Minishoot?

Thinking myself sane, I've spent the last couple years waiting for Minishoot' Adventures developer SoulGame Studio to explain itself in the form of a 13-minute "We need to talk" YouTube apology, or for another journalist to blow this controversy wide open. Neither has happened. When Minishoot' Adventures was ported to the Nintendo Switch 2 in March and received a new wave of critical acclaim, I rolled up my sleeves and vowed to get to the bottom of the mystery myself by spending six entire minutes writing an email.

Steel yourself: My findings may shock you.

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.

He's just French.

"To try and ease your bafflement I can only add that my attempt was to contract both Minimalist AND Shooter to create a portmanteau word: so Minimalist became mini, and Shooter became shoot'. Like rolling could become rollin', shooter could become shoot' right? My mistake was to assume that one could simply add an apostrophe to any word they wanted to shorten, which is, I understand now, non-sensical," Larose kindly wrote back to my email demanding he explain his crimes.

Larose said the question has come up time and again since 2024, and in hindsight he wishes he'd run the idea past some native English speakers before announcing the game. But he also didn't anticipate the game being successful enough for its name to matter, let alone drive one journalist with internet irony poisoning to the brink of insanity.

"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."

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!"