Image Credit: Dinosaur Polo Club

Mini Metro

is ostensibly a simple (yet elegant) public transportation simulator, where you drag different coloured lines from metro station to metro station, mapping a network in the same vein as the iconic maps of the London Underground or the New York City Subway.

The game lets you play in a variety of cities - Hong Kong, Berlin, Cairo - modelled after their bodies of water, which impact the difficulty. Take Osaka, which, due to its many islands, requires a well thought out deployment of the limited amount of tunnels you have access to. This makes the times when you're given a choice between a new line and another tunnel, or two tunnels or a new super-fast train, difficult. As I played the game more, I became better at all this stuff, which itself is a satisfying learning experience. Learning to become more efficient with my resources

, learning to connect various lines in the

right

way

, and ultimately, to not overcrowd any of your stations, which is the failstate in the game's main mode.

But that's all the boring, on-the-surface stuff out of the way. What's amazing about this game is how cohesive all its different elements are - the music and sound design, the clean and minimalist aesthetic inspired by the classic tube style of Harry Beck, the viscerally pleasing 'game-feel' of dragging and connecting stations - and how this all comes together to simulate a growing organism. A level might start with three simple icons - a triangle, a square, a circle - representing three small seeds of what will soon grow into an expansive and interconnected network. The game seems to simulate less a transportation system, and more a growing organism with all its tiny little components. And each time you play, the dynamic nature of the levels means that you're helping mould and create a complex interconnected organism. You can hear trains disembarking from stations, iconized passengers getting off trains, and even the sounds of lines clicking into place when you drag them to a new station. All these little sounds blend together to form a thick, detailed texture of procedurally generated music, masterfully designed by Rich Vreeland, better known as

Disasterpeace

(

Fez

,

It Follows

).

Yet despite the game's excellent fusion of gameplay, its presentational elements, and its subtle themes, it didn't hold me for as long as I would have liked. It engaged me while I was playing it, but I never felt a longing towards it when I was away from the game. Perhaps it will be more fit for its release on phones and tablets, which developer Dinosaur Polo Club says will come soon.

Rating:Platform: PC, MacRelease Date: 6 November 2015Developer: Dinosaur Polo Club