Mini Motorways

If you have ever been curious about the interesting magic of city-planning, while also feel yourself in need of something -Zen-like for relaxation—Mini Motorways might be a game work a look. With a rather simple concept born of a blank slate to a bustling community, the game offers both an opportunity to unwind and also stretch out your brain’s puzzle functions. The basic goal of the game is to make sure every car can commute to work. However, as the city grows that simple request can become far more complicated. What begins with a shopping complex to a home in a one-lane town soon becomes a full-fledged city complete with neighborhoods, malls, crossroads, bridges and stoplights.

Beauty by Design

The game begins simply and acts like the process of discovering an idea. You start small, and as you brainstorm you see it grow in real time. More colors come, more pathways, sometimes decisions work, sometimes they need to be amended to fit the story as a whole. In the same simplistic form as something like Journey, Abzu or even the newly released Dreams on Playstation - Mini Motorways encourages creativity and offers a view of the lovely and often more difficult parts of it.

Adapting and Refining

Time pushes forward in the corner of the screen on Mini Motorways, a few weeks in game time and a few minutes in the real world—all the orange buildings you started with can suddenly be seen adjacent to purple buildings, to blue ones and others as the city begins to take shape and form itself. New bridges, roads, roundabouts -all come together as the initial idea spreads out. When things become complicated, you find yourself adjusting roads, turning shopping centers, rounding corners, crossing rivers and somehow, always keeping an eye on that first commuter you helped. It’s a Zen-like experience, but without focus it can quickly get away form you.

Casual or Philosophical

As mentioned before Mini Motorways, without much context or overbearing UI or tooltips telling you exactly how to play and when to make a change, the game lets you learn for yourself. Without telling a story, every time it seems to tell you a story. You can take it as a time waster, a full game like Flower, or something in between. With both a metaphor for creativity and expanding on ideas while managing various moving parts, this game can be a great tool to focus on projects in your own life. It’s surprising, to be honest, that something a simple and casual by design can have as much heart as it does.

Mini Motorways pulls off a wonderful mix of casual, relaxing, and reflective. With only an ambient soundtrack, limited objectives and an ever-onward clock ticking away the game time as real time ticks - it is a wholly original gaming experience. You work through the grid for your city design, compare how your design and your score compares to others- or just to yourself.

Pros

• Relaxing, ambient music
• Beautiful metaphor of creativity
• Encourages problem-solving and adaptive gameplay

Cons

• Simple, but limited design
• No ability to turn off score comparison