![]() Let’s get into the basic mechanics so that I can explain why. It’s not that I have, in some feat of promethean intelligence, somehow solved the entire game and made further runs redundant - my proficiency with the puzzle genre is middling at best - but rather that, because of the limited number of tools and levers available to me as a player, the most reliable path towards “solving” Mini Motorways is one that I have no interest in pursuing. ![]() By contrast I’ve gone through all of Mini Motorways’ dozen city seeds now, and I don’t have the urge to play it any more. There is a fine balance to be struck here, and the games that carry it off tend to make it look deceptively easy I am reminded of last year’s A Monster’s Expedition, which took the basic concept of rolling logs around small islands and successfully spun it out into a 900-level game without it ever getting boring or stale. The more that I play Mini Motorways, though, the more I’m thinking that there was a significant price paid in exchange for its incredible aesthetic qualities: it’s taken the abstraction and simplification of its subject matter way too far to be an engaging long-term prospect as a puzzle game. It’s a pleasure to look at, a pleasure to interact with, and a pleasure to play. I have worked in several organisations that would kill to be able to express the core purpose of their product as simply and as naturally as Mini Motorways does. I have no doubt that when an iOS developer goes to sleep at night, they dream of things that look very much like Mini Motorways - and not without good reason, either, since Mini Motorways is in many ways the Holy Grail of UX design. The game is an extraordinary aesthetic achievement - a perfect blend of rounded edges, pastel colours, minimalist interface and intuitive touch-centric controls that seems to have been laser-targeted at Apple’s UX designers with the intention of sending them into paroxysms of orgasmic joy. It is not remotely surprising to me that Mini Motorways was immediately snapped up by Apple for a couple of years’ exclusivity on Apple Arcade.
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