Mini Metro: The Strangely Appealing World of Connecting the Dots

After being in Early Access for quite some time, Mini Metro was finally let out into the wild on Steam this year. It's a game where you build subway / light rail systems with what seems like a simple goal: serve as many passengers as possible and last as many days as you possibly can. There's only one thing that you must never ever do, and that's let your stations start to get overcrowded. If you do, it's game over.

See, it sounds simple enough, but after a couple of weeks of your subways being a success, everyone in town will start wanting to use the thing and suddenly you've got a whole lot of busy stations on your hands. What started as a nice, relaxing experience then turns into a frantic race against time to build new stations, add more trains and carriages to busy lines, and a quick prayer to the gods of RNG that the game will award you that one thing you really need to save your entire subway system from certain doom. Translation: you'll never get tunnels when you really need them. "I can't need that many tunnels," you said.

There is a pretty interesting mix of cities featured in the game. While we do get some no-brainers like London, Paris, and New York, we also get to play around in places like St. Petersburg, Sao Paulo, and Cairo. One thing that I noticed very quickly regardless of the level is that you'll invariably have to deal with bodies of water, be it a river (like the Thames in London) or small islands / reclaimed land (Osaka has a lot of these). So, right off the bat, players need to think about how they'll make use of limited resources, be it tunnels / bridges for crossing the water, or whether to have multiple lines cross the rivers, or just leave one to deal with as much of the bridgework as possible.

If anything, this is the big thing that players need to keep an eye on while laying out their subway networks. How many extra lines do they have? Any extra trains available? Tunnels? Wouldn't it be nice to have an interchange for increasing capacity at a station. Will I get an extra carriage next week to help take some of the strain off of the blue line? Once things get rolling it always feels like you have barely or not quite enough tools on hand to accommodate all of the people trying to get around town, which pours on the pressure as stations start flashing and making beeping noises warning you of overcrowding and an imminent game over if you don't do something about it soon.

Of course, the question is how do you do this, because there are a lot of options. You can add another train to the line, and even then you have to decide if it will go in the same or opposite direction of existing trains already on it. Alternately, you could toss another carriage on a train, or, if you're lucky and have one in your inventory, upgrade a particularly busy station to hold more passengers via an interchange. Then again it may make more sense to add a new line that runs parallel to parts of a busy line to help take off some of the strain while at the same time servicing other far flung areas. Decisions, decisions.

With all of this going on, the game's simplistic, almost soothing presentation provides a sharp contrast. The screen looks like a map you would expect to find in a subway with colored lines representing the various train routes and little symbols for the stations. Meanwhile, it's hard to call the music "music" because it's more or less a series of pleasing tons that radiate from the speakers, adding new layers with each additional line, train and station. For all of the chaos that builds up in the game as stations begin to swell with passengers, the very basic approach to aesthetic does its best to provide a bit of a calming oasis.

At first, I was tempted to look at Mini Metro as a straightforward casual sort of game to whittle away the waning moments of an evening with before going to bed, but the more I play it, the more I appreciate just how much it will challenge the player by steadily ratcheting up the pressure. This is something one could spend a lot of time on if they let the game suck them in, especially if you're the sort who loves leaderboards. The game lulls people into a false sense of security with its minimalist presentation, then starts sinking its claws in one map at a time. I'd say it's something worth looking into for people who want a strategy game that's tries to do something other than the usual turn-based / real time, campaign-heavy approach that the genre is known for. Sometimes getting commuters around town is ten times more stressful than fighting off an army of tanks.