Whack them on the same road and they all take up space. Compared to that, cars are a pain, frankly. In Mini Metro your trains ghost past each other in that whispering way that they do on the real tube - maybe a hint of flickering light in the distance, maybe a shudder or rush of wind. Surely Mini Motorways is like that, right? Red houses and blue houses need to connect to their businesses, surely an elegant superhighway will allow you to cobble this together in no time.īut cars are not subway trains. Your stations were simple shapes and your job was to connect lines that covered as many shapes as possible, so that your passengers, who were also simple shapes, could always get to the matching station. Also the game features a colour-blind mode. Mini Metro has the glorious iconography of Harry Beck's London Tube Map to lean on - I have only just this second learned that Beck was an electrical draughtsman, but really it's all right there on the page isn't it? Mini Motorways uses roads and a handful of other symbols, but while you're playing both games in similar ways - drawing routes, matching shapes or colours, and dealing with supply and demand that you have no control over - both games could not be more different.
I wanted to be in the know about something so effortlessly beautiful and busy and refined.īoth Mini Metro and Mini Motorways are games about creating transit systems.
I wanted to know how to turn these abstract shapes and colours into an activity.
"Just look at those particle effects!" perhaps, or "I really do want to climb that mountain in the distance." Mini Motorways, like Mini Metro, the game that came before it, is a game I knew I had to play as soon as I saw it. You need to provide a little of the human magic to put Mini Motorways' abstract landscape together, because otherwise it's just beautiful iced tea colours - peaches and mints - while its soundtrack is a chilled tumbler of pips and muttering hums and clicks and whistles and honks, that are bird song, then traffic, then a kind of music of homeostasis the more you play.Īll of which is to say: there are some games that you want to play the moment you see a screenshot of them. The game begins properly when you start to see those two rectangles as a house, and when you see the slanted shadow around a business and realise that the business is big, a skyscraper, and you are clearly viewing it from above. Maybe I am reading too much into it, reading too much into two rectangles of colour laid against each other, which the eye cannot help transforming, given the context, into the pitched roof of a modest little house. Maybe it would be claustrophobic and terrifying if you ran out of contact lens solution, I can imagine there would be problems. What would it be like to live in a ghost home? Maybe it would be wonderful and freeing. They are taking up space in the city, but they are not plugged into its rhythms and its circulation. They are in the city but they are not of the city. So these sad, unconnected homes I call ghost homes. Because you only have a finite amount of road at any time, it may make sense to leave homes unconnected, to save your road for a time when you really need it. Guess what it means? It means these things are not equal you do not have to connect every home that pops up if you want to keep the businesses happy. Look at that relationship: all the demand in the businesses, all the supply in the homes. Here is an early tip - one that feels illicit, practically shameful. When businesses have too much unmet demand for too long, it means that your city has not worked very well and it's game over.
Everything is colour-coded, so red businesses only want people who live in red homes. Instead, you build the roads that allow people to drive back and forth. The businesses demand people and the homes supply them and they both pop up all over the place, conveniently and inconveniently as you play. Roads connect big buildings, which I'll call businesses, where people presumably work or buy stuff, with little buildings, or homes, where people presumably live. Mini Motorways asks you to create a city purely by focusing on its roads.
Availability: Out now on PC and Apple Arcade.The terminology is mine, but if you played this game on Apple Arcade or have even the lightest of acquaintances with an enthusiast, you may know what I'm talking about. Of all the imaginary people games ask me to care about, I think I care the most about the imaginary people who live in Mini Motorways' ghost homes. The Apple Arcade classic comes to PC and is as glorious as ever.