Minabo is one of those beautiful stories in the videogame world where a good marketing campaign ends up bringing enormous visibility to an indie title. In today’s videogame industry, dozens or even hundreds of titles are released every day, and standing out as a small indie videogame is no easy task.
The Valencian studio DevilishGames, with more than 20 years of experience behind them, found a simple way to get their next game, Minabo, on everyone’s lips. How? By doing exactly the same thing the author of these lines has just done: playing with double entendres (how we love jokes).
With phrases like “I can’t wait for you to play with Minabo” or “all the things you can do with Minabo”, both DevilishGames and David Ferriz, founder of the studio, got thousands of Spanish-speaking tweeters with “a lot of fun” to viralise the videogame months before its release. Streamers, videogame websites, gamers and even people who barely play videogames echoed. Everyone was talking about Minabo.
Months later, Minabo is out and everyone has been able to try it out. Yes, Softonic too. We’ve had the chance to play this flashy indie video game thanks to the good people at ICO Partners and this is what we thought of it.
Life is not a lentil, it’s a turnip.
Yes, the (wonderful) jokes about Minabo are all very well, but you’re probably wondering: what exactly is this game about? Minabo is a side-scrolling life simulator in which we progress our character, a newborn turnip, along a journey that represents his own life.
In a few minutes, we will go from crawling to taking our first steps, while we meet all kinds of turnips with which we can build our social circle. Similar to our own lives, in Minabo we will have 3 basic needs: physical contact, intimacy and belonging. These needs will mark the state of mind of the turnips, influencing their staffity, as well as their own life expectancy.
Because, yes, this is a game about life and, as such, characters die when the time comes. The younger the turnip (including our character), the higher its maximum vitality will be, but, as we grow older, death will be closer and closer and we will have to take our needs into account if we don’t want to die quickly.
For this to happen sooner rather than later, we will have to constantly interact with the rest of the turnips around us, including our parents, our siblings, strangers and even turnip-pets (yes, the pet in the picture is called Mistetas). While the relationship with our family will not change (in principle…), relationships with other turnips will evolve depending on how much we get involved.
We will go from strangers to acquaintances, then to friends, then to best friends, then to romances and, if things go all the way, we can have a partner and raise our own children.
The social relations system is very simple: you can interact with other turnips to try to raise (mutually) a basic need, but the success of the action will depend on a probability that will be visually displayed in the game. If the action goes well, both turnips will raise their meter a little, but, if the action fails, it will lower for both of them.
When we start the game for the first time, we will be presented with two game modes: on the one hand, there are the missions, a series of levels with different objectives that will serve as tutorials at first, gradually adding new mechanics and gradually increasing the difficulty. On the other hand, once we have finished the first 5 missions we will unlock free life, with which we will be able to live our experiences freely, without any objective beyond… well, you know, living.
But, as in life itself, in Minabo we will be faced with choices. As we walk along the path of our lives, we will find various objects with which we can increase or decrease the life of any turnip (including our character) or even end the life of one. The decisions will not be easy on many occasions, but that is something we are used to in our own lives, isn’t it?
Along the way we’ll also encounter turnips wearing very striking hats. Each of them brings a different effect, such as a crown that gives us the chance to pair up with our own siblings (the traditions of monarchies, you know), and we’ll have to win them in a game of rock-paper-scissors (this will appeal to Alex Kidd fans).
To add to Minabo’s curl (this joke was “on the money”), there will be certain “enemies” that will make life a little more difficult for us. In our adventures through life, we will have to walk (live, that is) without much pause, in order to avoid moths, a mother mole called Topota (Topota mother, in fact) and even nature itself, which will let loose the odd bolt of lightning with dire consequences.
All these elements are combined with a very cute and colourful artwork (the clouds have little faces and that warms my heart) and wonderful music that will change as your turnip grows.
A life simulator that cuts to the chase
The real magic of indie games is that we get to see things that are very different from what we commonly see in big-budget titles, and Minabo does this in a very welcome way.
For starters, it’s a game that everyone will appreciate differently. Yes, it’s obvious: everyone’s experience is different when it comes to playing, but Minabo explores this feeling from a much more… personal point of view.
Each journey we undertake will be totally different and, with it, the experiences we will have. While in some lives we will be more sociable with the people around us, in others we will care more about our pets. In some cases, our family will be single-parent, but in other lives we will be a large family (affecting the number of turnips we can relate to).
Minabo perfectly conveys a very real concept: life goes by very quickly. One day you are a young child making your first friends and, by the time you realise it, you are already a turnip with many years behind you, with a partner and children. This is not the particular case of the person writing these lines, but that hasn’t stopped me from shedding a tear when I wrote this paragraph.
Yes, life can be complicated, but it is worth living. Some Minabo games will be difficult due to the circumstances that we will have to overcome, but we will live very varied experiences that will make us smile a lot and that will even make us think about the path that we ourselves walk in real life.
Minabo test.
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