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Minabo a Walk Through Life is an indie video game developed by DevilishGames and published by Selecta Play that will be released on Xbox in a few days. The title is presented as a simple life simulator, where our little tuber makes his way from his birth on earth, until the day he dies, going through relationships with his parents and his environment, siblings, friends, partner and even children.
This title is quite complicated to analyze, because although the idea and concept is the freshest I’ve seen in years, I can’t say much about the gameplay. Minabo a Walk Through Life is an experience, one that is quite reflective and that is enjoyed much more with a friend, this responds to the debates that we can raise once we have finished with one of its levels. I don’t get tangled up anymore and let’s go with this analysis of Minabo a Walk Through Life.
When I started playing this video game I expected a more traditional game experience, but I found the opposite, and the fact is that the enjoyment of the game came after finishing the first level and starting to talk with my partner about what had just happened. It sounds very counterintuitive but I promise I will do my best to put into words what it meant to play Minabo a Walk Through Life.
Minabo to Walk Through Life Analysis
What is minabo?
When starting one of the 25 levels of Minabo, the video game introduces us to our character and gives us the option to give it a name, once the name theme is finished we must press the button TO repeatedly to see how our turnip sprouts from the ground and begins its life, the interface is simplistic with 3 status bars and the level objectives, the bars go from physical contact, intimacy and belonging, the 3 are key in emotional development of a person and therefore of our turnip.
After 10 minutes I finished the first level and understood what the experience would be like, Minabo’s gameplay is simple, too simple. The goal is not to neglect your 3 status meters and live as long as possible, the rest feels like a bunch of messages on the screen that after the first few minutes make you lose all interest and it’s not because it’s not interesting, but because you you keep waiting for something to happen as you move forward and that something never comes.
This is where the reflections begin, my turnip dies at 100 years old and a tombstone appears with a message indicating the milestones in the life of our character, in my case the tombstone indicates that he lived life in a fast and carefree way, that he had a couple whom he loved very much and had many friends and children. All this to me felt very strange, what the game was telling me felt like it hadn’t happened, but another part of me knew it was 100% real.
An experience that continues when you stop playing
The most interesting aspect with Minabo occurs when you share your experience with someone, and that is where you can see that the game has had the support of psychologists. You begin to ask yourself questions about how you played a certain level and how, as in life, you feel that time goes by very quickly, so fast that you can’t assimilate everything that is happening around you, you meet people, you make friends but you don’t they all last, some you don’t even see again.
The problem is that all this meta-analysis that you do with the game, you don’t do it during a level that you play, but after finishing one or failing it. You begin to understand that as your tuber, your time here is limited, that you cannot be aware of everything that happens around you, much less all the loved ones and friends you make on your way. It leaves me a little cold when I realize that the game tries to convey a message and with its simple premise it succeeds.
Minabo as a video game
This is where the problems begin, personally I consider that Minabo is totally worth it but not as a video game, Minabo is an experience that you must live (hopefully accompanied) and comment on it later. The idea and concept is great, but unfortunately its “gameplay” is non-existent, too simplistic and made me lose interest quickly. However, when the conclusions of the level appear, the game leaves you with a feeling that you need to share with someone what has just happened.
In my case, I had to share the experience with my partner and only then, together, we were able to elucidate the message that the game was trying to propose to us, they weren’t just levels and missions, they were experiences and objectives of a turnip that represented a person living in a society, someone like any of us who is walking through his life from your earliest age to the last days of your existence, where you will remember your friends, family, pets, couples and how you influenced all of them.
conclusions
With its pros and cons, Minabo a Walk Through Life manages to convey what it is looking for, although its gameplay is basic and even boring at times (due to repetitiveness), the conversations it brings with it are very interesting, for which I recommend everyone to give it a try. an opportunity for what it is, an experience that will leave you thinking a lot about your life, what has happened, the people you have shared with and the feelings associated with it.
This is how you play with Minabo, the Spanish social simulator that arrives at the end of the month
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That moment when your turnip dies and you see its milestones on the tombstone is pretty revealing, the first time I got the impression was “when all this happened”. But as in life, sometimes we have to take things easy, take a step back and try to see the whole before moving forward, this is why I think Minabo will be a regular topic of conversation, there will be people who don’t get it or like me, that I don’t get it the first or second time, at the end of the day I think Minabo touched my heart.