The new indie life sim game Minabo: a walk through life follows the simple path of turnips from seed to plate. However, the game fails to add any excitement to this essential route, and the anthropomorphized turnips come across as emotionally needy and cynical. The game’s allegorical life sim metaphor for human existence lacks charm, irreverence, and pleasant absurdity. There are better examples of this kind of abstracted game experience and narrative, and the game’s comparably steep $15 price tag isn’t doing it any favors.
Every game-turnip’s life starts the same way, and they have three draining needs: physical contact, intimacy, and belonging. These represent the fundamental stats of Minabo: a walk through life, represented as bars that fill by interacting with fellow turnips on the journey from left to right. Failing to keep the bars topped off drains life expectancy, and a given playthrough can wrap up in a few bursts of fast living or as a ponderous extended sequence, though the limits of the game’s mechanics and interactive potential make the latter a drag. It feels, perhaps fittingly, like a farming game in certain respects, but absent of any satisfying gameplay loop to be found.
The cartoonish storybook presentation of Minabo weighs heavily on the game, with turnip characters appearing as animated drawings with sticks for arms and legs. It’s a style that makes a nice first impression but fails to serve or engage the game’s weirdly dour themes of death, failure, isolation, and emotional frustration. The music is limited to a single energetic piece of music that all but the most masochistic will be muting in the options menu after 30 minutes or less. Oddly, playing the game in silence adds an unintentionally creepier aspect to its cycles of life and highlights the gratingly repetitive vocal sound effects that accompany every painfully slow action.
A tutorial walks players through the first “mission” of Minabo, but it mostly comes down to experimentation from there on out. At first, it appears like there’s a little more depth and variety to the gameplay, but it all boils down to walking from left to right and emotionally “testing” NPC turnips. Click on a fellow turnip, and one of their three emotional needs can be activated, with a circle marked in green and red hinting at likely success or failure. Fail an emotional “roll,” and both the target and player’s gauges drain, making almost any click a risky venture, only made more frustrating when trying to click a single turnip in a herd of their peers. Low bars can prompt anger, even options to resent the offending turnip and forge an enemy, but can just as well lead to friendship and even romance.
It seems that Minabo’s significantly shallow gameplay gets in the way of its emotional needs…
2023-05-15 16:00:04
Source from screenrant.com