Minabo – A walk through life is a life simulator where you play as… a turnip. The game perfectly models social interactions in society, but drowns in monotony and repetitiveness. We tell you more in the review.
Developer: DevilishGames
Publisher: DevilishGames
Release date: April 28, 2023
It’s strange to see a game about a sentient, upright turnip, but what the developers won’t come up with, right? In Minabo – A walk through life, you live many lives as a root vegetable with eyes, arms and legs, with each life beginning and ending the same way: from birth and crawling out of the ground until death, when only a small tombstone remains after the turnip.
But what kind of legacy your character will leave is up to you. Although turnips are plants, they behave exactly like people. The baby turnip is not yet able to walk, it crawls on the ground, trying to keep up with its parents. At this stage, it is important to reach out to relatives in order to develop three main characteristics: physical contact, intimacy and belonging, which directly affects the maximum life expectancy: if you keep all parameters at a level close to the maximum, then the turnip will live a long and happy life.
When the hero grows up a bit and gets on his feet, other characters will appear next to him: you can get to know them and make friends. Pets will also appear here: it is not easy to tame them, but the pet will love the protagonist until death, and its level of affection will never decrease, unlike the “human” turnips, with which it is necessary to constantly maintain a close relationship.
A teenage turnip, due to its age, will become irritated and dissatisfied, but will be able to strengthen friendship with other turnips, and even start a first romance. When the hero grows up a little, he will have the opportunity to turn the novel into love, to acquire offspring. Well, then adulthood awaits him and, finally, old age, after which his path will end.
Minabo – A walk through life very clearly, albeit with simplifications, demonstrates the social life of a small society – a family and characters close to it. The turnip moves only to the right and cannot go back, which symbolizes the irreversibility of the life path and the inability to change any decisions. The hero grows very quickly, and the player will not have time to get to know absolutely all the characters he meets, develop relationships with them to the maximum – just like in real life. Some of the turnips close to the protagonist gradually lag behind him and remain behind – this is what happens to us when we are too detached from our parents, brothers and sisters, friends, immersed in our own affairs.
The game contains two and a half dozen missions and a sandbox mode, offering progressively more difficult tasks: live beyond a given age, have three children, not make friends, die surrounded by relatives, and so on. Each task is like a puzzle: you need to understand exactly how to interact with others, which actions to prioritize and which ones to ignore in order to achieve the goal. It becomes even more difficult when the hero begins to pursue Stomp – some kind of inevitable fate that will eat the protagonist if he lingers in one place for a long time.
It is interesting to select the “keys” to life goals, but not to play directly. All the player is required to do is interact with other reps using the three commands that affect the aforementioned stats. Each action has a chance of failing, which will entail new attempts to build relationships, while the turnip you want to interact with may run somewhere ahead, and you will have to look for it among other similar turnips.
As the protagonist grows older, he acquires some personality traits – for example, he can become more relaxed or, conversely, shy. However, these traits don’t seem to have much of an effect on gameplay, and the conditions required to acquire them are not obvious. There are also hats that give passive bonuses: they can be taken from some characters by winning the “rock-paper-scissors”, but the effect of the properties of hats on the gameplay is also not clear.
In addition, Minabo – A walk through life has a very slow pace: one life, from the cradle to the grave, can take about half an hour, and during this time you will poke at the characters, choosing from three actions, and pressing the movement key repeatedly, to make the character move a little faster than the turtle. In fact, in the very first mission you will see everything that the game has to offer, and then life goals will only change and small innovations will appear.
As a result, the title leaves an ambiguous impression. Beautiful art style, nice soundtrack, funny characters, an interesting overall idea and a visual representation of the interactions in society – all this stumbles over routine gameplay and repetitiveness. Minabo – A walk through life can be seen as a heavily simplified alternative to The Sims series, but the game can get boring very quickly.
Reader Rating0 Votes
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pros
Interesting setting
Reliable modeling of society
A large number of missions
Beautiful art and nice soundtrack
Minuses
The game shows off everything it has to offer very early on
Gameplay soon becomes monotonous and routine
Some tasks are very difficult
