According to the Singapore rating board, mini-games are coming back to the series with Mortal Kombat 1, and we even have a description of one of the modes.
"The player may encounter a mini-game in certain game modes, where a decapitated head may be presented to the player character to destroy, in order to progress," the rating board said (as reported by Twisted Voxel).
It's silly, but in a completely different way to fighting a fridge or a car like in Street Fighter. A decapitated head is gruesome, to say the least, let alone mushing it up with your fists (if that's how you destroy it, at least). It's not the first time that we've seen a mode like this in the series, though. While Test Your Strike in MK9 saw Johnny Cage smashing bricks, it also saw Reptile destroying human skulls while Baraka mashed up severed heads. Sounds familiar, eh? We don't know the name of MK1's mini-game, so it could well be Test Your Strike making a comeback, with the decapitated heads being one of the tiers.
In MK9's Test Your Strike, hitting the heads would simply cause them to explode into a red cloud of blood. It wasn't detailed enough to be that unsettling, though a table of chopped-off heads looking blankly outward was creepy in its own right. Games have advanced a lot since 2011, so MK1's rendition will no doubt be more detailed, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing when it comes to a pile of lopped-off noggins. Does Fire God Liu Kang collect them? I don't want to know.
That still leaves a few old mini-games on the table, right next to all the skulls. Chess Kombat, Test Your Luck, Test Your Balance... the list goes on. Whether we'll see any of these make a comeback is unclear, but we do know that the Krypt won't. Ed Boon said that there's "a whole new system [for unlocks]" that's "not the Krypt". What that system is still isn't known, but gone are the days of solving puzzles in a Metroid-like dungeon to open chests full of goodies, something we saw built on with each of the new Netherrealm games.
But with Baraka back, it's only fitting that destroying decapitated heads is too. It was confirmed three days ago that he, Tanya, and Li Mei are all joining the main roster at launch. Baraka has made a couple of appearances in the past three games, but Li Mei hasn't been fully playable since Armageddon in 2006, way back in the 3D era. Now she can enjoy the visual fidelity of current-gen, and all the realistic decapitated heads one could ever want.