There’s something deeply fascinating, emotional, yet easygoing and simplistic about Minabo.

You start life as a sproutling and have to live your life to the fullest, romancing other turnips, having pets, children, collecting hats and making a bunch of friends. Even enemies.

It’s a simple, cruising adventure where you press a button, making conversational choices with friends, family and perfect strangers you encounter along the way. The aim, is trying to keep a healthy balance of belonging, physical contact and intimacy.

The journey is fascinating, in that you start with an immediate birth family and have to find that happy balance of the three action bars, keeping one eye on your Life Expectancy. You stay healthy by keeping up a balance throughout your life, keeping up social commitments as much as you can, and being weary of what you find along the way.

Eventually you age and go from crawling to speeding up, to slowing down as you get older. But the same applies for those you surround yourself with. As you make lots of new friends and build relationships, your parents slow down and get a bit left behind, same for old friends. It’s oddly tragic, especially as it’s easy to forget about them as you build your new relationships to keep yourself young.

Along the way, you’ll be able to pick up gifts, as well as encounter unique items that can have harmful or helpful benefits and even play rock, paper, scissors for hats.

The game takes place over a series of 25 missions, each with three main sets of criteria, varying from living x amount of years, to making a bunch of enemies. But once you’ve completed 5 of them, you can live a free life to do what you will.

It’s a moving game, no doubt, and its simplicity means it can be played in the background while watching something or doing anything else. It’s essentially a clicker, where you determine the best conversational choice you can make with another turnip in any moment by how much of the green bar is taken up by it.

While there’s some fundamental thinking that’s gone into this and you can find your own reflections at times, it all starts to get a bit dull once you’ve got a feel for the game.

A life, led to the full, can take around 15 minutes depending on what you’re doing with it, so this is a game best played in short bursts as it can quickly become quite repetitive despite the mission types.

Beyond the above, there’s not a whole lot more to breakdown here and for the price tag, it’s quite steep. But for quick bursts of something to do in between other titles, and for a point of reflection while playing, this is among the better, more thought-provoking clickers out there.

Verdict

Minabo: A Walk Through Life is an easy-going, happy-g0-lucky clicker that can evoke some deep thought and reflection. It’s fairly simplistic, though, so its price might raise an eyebrow but if you’re looking for some downtime between games or while watching TV, this could fill a gap.