Developer: Doot, Blibloop, Zakku

Publisher: Doot Tiny Games, Wholesome Games Presents

Played on: PC

Release Date: February 28, 2024

Played with: Mouse

Paid: $30.66 (Multi-game Bundle)

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It’s a great time of year for cozy games.  With the weather getting colder (though where I am it’s still unseasonably warm) and the days shorter, there’s nothing quite like curling up with a welcoming game.  Well, maybe not literally; it’s hard to curl up at a computer desk without getting into spine-mangling poses.  Be that as it may, jumping into Minami Lane at this time of year turned out to be an excellent choice on my part.  It’s a brief experience, but one which I absorbed in bite-sized portions, making it seem longer than it actually was.  And for my money, if you like the idea of a city-builder game but get easily overwhelmed, it’s well worth a look.

At its core, Minami Lane is a puzzly management game where you have to build up a street of houses and attractions, all while balancing citizen satisfaction and personal income.  When playing through the five-scenario campaign, you also have primary objectives that must be fulfilled, as well as optional secondary goals if you want an additional challenge.  For example, the first level asks you to build a boba cafe as well as get to a certain population and satisfaction rating, and the optional mission is to do it within twelve turns.

Now, you may be thinking, “Well that’s easy: I’ll just throw down a boba cafe on turn one and then focus on boosting population and happiness!”  That was certainly what I thought, however it turns out that many of Minami Lane’s buildings have construction requirements beyond simply financial ones.  In the case of the boba cafe, it requires a minimum population and satisfaction level in order to be built, which immediately snowballed into other concerns during my playthrough.  Increasing population is a simple matter of building more housing, but people want their neighbourhood to look nice, and adding more folks increases demand for charm.  Thus, I had to worry about keeping the street’s beauty score up as more people moved in, upgrading buildings to have plants around them and building parks for people to relax in.

Then of course there’s money, which you earn from people going to your shops.  Some shops sell multiple items, in which case you select which three you’ll make available, while others sell one thing with a customizable recipe.  Either way, your goal is to make the offerings as appealing as possible to your customers while also setting prices that will net you a tidy profit without gouging people.  As customers visit your businesses, you can click on them to see what feedback they have, whether it’s critiquing your prices or available items, or simply saying everything’s perfect.  A handy feature is that each piece of feedback has a little “save” button next to it, which allows you to record it for the next day; that way, you don’t have to remember what everyone said when you’re updating your shops!

Thankfully, everyone in Minami Lane is part of one of two hive minds: youths or elders.  Each group has their own preferences that seldom overlap with the other, but if you find the perfect ramen recipe for one elder, you’ve found the perfect ramen recipe for them all.  This means that sometimes it can be beneficial to set up two of the same type of shop: one catering to elders and one for the youths, though interestingly if there’s a majority of one type on your street, it’s still possible to achieve 100% satisfaction by catering exclusively to them.

There’s also trash to pick up, a hidden tanuki each day, and – on later levels – cats to pet and cyclists to catch, all of which give you some money when interacted with, with the cats also sometimes providing a small boost to satisfaction.  Oh, and later missions have random events each day, which can include anything from nothing happening to one of the age groups suddenly desiring a completely new recipe at one of your shops.

If this seems like a lot to keep track of, it both should and shouldn’t.  The tutorial level of Minami Lane basically gives you a goal and lets you figure things out, which I found a bit alienating at first, particularly for a game with such a cozy and welcoming vibe.  The good news is it’s pretty easy to learn the ropes and start building up a cute little street, and from the first level onwards, the game introduces new mechanisms at a solid clip without letting things get overwhelming.  Each mission (with the exception of the final one) only has a limited selection of buildings available, so the decision space stays reasonable.  Plus, the way that prerequisites are set up for the shops that are often central to your objectives does a good job of guiding the player’s decisions.  You need a certain population to build a boba cafe, so you build more housing.  Then your satisfaction goes down, so you build more beautiful spaces.  Then you need money so you build some shops.  And on it goes, easing you into the decisions that have to be made during the game without having to resort to excessive tutorial pop-ups and tiresome hand-holding.

In a way, the game’s five missions act as one extended tutorial to Minami Lane’s sandbox mode, where you have more freedom to build your ideal neighbourhood without having to worry about objectives.  However, the missions also provide enough meat (each lasted me around twenty to thirty minutes) that I was happy to close the game and take a break after each one.  That’s the thing with Minami Lane: its laid-back tone makes it the perfect game for jumping into for a brief play session, constructing a cozy little street, and then leaving it to do something else for a bit, satisfied that you accomplished something.  I could certainly see someone marathoning the missions, but it feels antithetical to the game’s design and overly clinical.

Perhaps that can be seen as a fault of the game.  It didn’t hook me for multiple hours at a time like others have, and if I’m being honest, I don’t feel much interest in hitting up the sandbox mode now that I’ve rolled the credits.  I also think that one of the upgrades for the Service Centre building (an investigator who automatically saves customer feedback for you and highlights when selections in your shops are perfect for a particular group) feels a little too necessary in a game that generally wants to be freeform, especially once the street starts filling up and it becomes difficult to track specific customers.  Lastly, it would be nice if events could be disabled in the sandbox mode, since they add an element of randomness that can be annoying if, say, the preferred boba recipe of the youths changes right after you’ve found the perfect one.

Ultimately, Minami Lane is like a really nice box of chocolates.  It’s great in bite-sized pieces and sweet while it lasts, but you may end up being done with it sooner than you’d like.  To extend the metaphor, like all the best fancy chocolate, it’s very visually appealing to boot.  Everything in the game has a warm, welcoming look, from the little buildings with their customizable colour schemes to the people and cats that roam the streets.  I wish there was more variety on the audio side (the same track plays unchanged on all but the final level), but I can appreciate that such things probably aren’t a priority for smaller projects like this.

The fact that Minami Lane was apparently put together in a mere six months really makes it hard to critique, particularly when it comes to the relatively limited amount of content on offer.  It’s priced appropriately too, and as someone who tends to gravitate towards shorter games anyway, it feels hypocritical to be docking it points for something I usually prefer.  What it boils down to is that, while I did enjoy my time with Minami Lane and find little to fault it for, it simply wasn’t the kind of knock-out experience that I’d usually associate with a nine or a ten.  It was pleasant and fun while it lasted, but I think it just as easily could fade into the background of games I’ve played this year.  To sum it up and quit waffling, Minami Lane is sweet, but insubstantial, and as long as you know what you’re getting into, I think it’s a lovely time, regardless of how brief that time may be.

8.5/10