Minami Lane Lets You Build The Walkable Neighborhood You Wish You Had In Real Life
Hit the streets.
Running an entire city is stressful. That’s as true in most city builders as I assume it is in real life. But while running a single street would still be a lot of responsibility in the real world, it turns out to be considerably more relaxing in video game form.
Released in 2024, Minami Lane is a minimalist management sim where, instead of building a bustling city or managing supply lines, you’re responsible for simply keeping up one nice street. Most city builders are about efficiency and growth. You need to manage scarce resources carefully, keep the money rolling in, and expand as much as possible without going broke. Minami Lane is instead concerned with beauty and the happiness of residents. You do have to fill your coffers to build up your street, but the ultimate goal is to make it a place where people want to live, and you’re encouraged to make it aesthetically pleasing while you’re at it.
Minami Lane is a street-level view of building the nicest neighborhood possible.
You start Minami Lane with just a few buildings, which the game uses to introduce you to the basics. Rather than managing infrastructure, you’re given control over where to place shops and houses in order to make your street usable for its residents. In a way, that makes it feel more like RollerCoaster Tycoon than Sim City, with an even tighter focus on the tiny people roaming the environments you create.
While Minami Lane is certainly more chill than the average city builder, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more hands-off. Along with placing buildings, you’re given a lot of control over all aspects of how your shops run. After plunking down a ramen shop or a book store, you get to decide which stock they carry and set the prices they’ll charge. While that feels a bit prescriptive, the goal is always to give people what they want rather than extracting as much from them as you can.
Minami Lane is also more focused on reaching immediate goals than playing the long game, as many city builders tend to be. Minami Lane is broken into levels with discrete objectives. You might need to maintain a certain population and happiness level or build a specific shop and get people interested in what it’s selling. That makes Minami Lane easy to play in short bursts and it also eliminates what can be the biggest bummer of playing management games — making a mistake early on that spells your doom much later, when far too much time has elapsed to go back and fix it.
Minami Lane focuses on making its residents (including cats) happy.
That more bite-sized approach also applies to Minami Lane’s entire length. Unusually for its genre, Minami Lane is not a “forever” game. It’s pretty short, in fact, clocking it at under five hours to complete its entire level-based mode. It feels about the right length to keep the game feeling charming and just challenging enough the whole time, without ever starting to wear thin thanks to its somewhat limited scope. Once you’ve finished the main campaign, Minami Lane also has a sandbox mode where you’re free to build to your heart’s content without any specific objectives. And it’s here that the focus on creativity comes to the forefront, as designing the most aesthetically appealing street takes over from hitting specific goals.
Minami Lane feels like a perfect middle ground between a vibey, minimalist game and checklist management sims. It offers just enough direction to keep you working toward objectives without ever losing the sense that what you’re doing is something joyful and chill. Checking tasks off your list is great, but the real satisfaction comes from making a walkable neighborhood that keeps all of its residents happy, and a street so cozy that stray cats gather to make it their new home. If only we could all live in a place so nice.
