I’ve been reading about the endocrine system recently. It’s all completely fascinating. I’m used to the nervous systems by now, these huge networks of messages zipping back and forth around the body, electricity hopping between nodes and the atomiser kiss of synapses firing. But then here’s a separate network and separate messages: hormones, glands, slower and somehow more tidal.
This stuff has folded itself into my thoughts on Mini Motorways, I think. Mini Motorways is the follow-up to Mini Metro, an absolute classic that sees players coaxing subway systems to life from a few nodes and a few lines of colour. Deep down it’s about managing the flow: making sure stations don’t fill up with passengers, making sure everyone gets where they want to go fairly briskly.
Mini Motorways is very similar – at least on the surface. You still have to connect nodes together to get people from A to B, the whole thing’s still gorgeously sparse and accompanied by a soundtrack of humming, clicking, pinging and shuffling, even the camera works the same way, steadily moving outwards as your network grows, yet at some magical pace you can never actually notice.
But motorways are a different kind of network to subways. They abstract differently. And they ask different things of you. I am still learning just what they ask, and even so, I am already deeply in love.
Mini Motorways Teaser Trailer Watch on YouTube
Real talk: it feels wrong to play this game on any map other than Los Angeles. Los Angeles is where motorways have found their truest expression, I think, in the spaghetti tangles, sure, but in those sinuous arcing elevated roads, too, soaring through canyon and subdivide, taking you forward towards a centre that, as a friend once pointed out, is always suggesting itself while never actually appearing.