Minami Lane Review (InAnotherCatsle)
This game is very cute.
You build a little shopping street, and through Mastermind-style logic try and figure out what your customer bases want to buy, and at what price. You'll also need to hunt for hidden tanuki, clean up litter, and eventually pet cats and greet cyclists, so there is a slight clicker element as well.
Each building you construct has a small range of color and/or roof options, and most have two ways to upgrade them - either by making them flashier to attract more sales, or by adding greenery to increase the beauty of your street.
There are a total of five missions in the game, and the challenge level for each mission feels fair and satisfying - with new buildings, customers, and game mechanics being introduced at a reasonable enough pace to keep things interesting while not overwhelming the player. I know five missions may not seem like a lot, but it truly is just enough to see everything the game has to offer without it becoming too repetitious or overstaying its welcome. I was able to finish every optional objective on the first try.
There are also two sandbox modes - one that starts you at base level and lets you slowly grow your street over time, and one that gives you complete creative freedom from the get-go. Unfortunately, there is not quite enough visual variety or gameplay complexity to warrant continuing to play after beating the final mission, so the only real reason to check out either sandbox mode is to set up ideal conditions to easily clear any of your last lingering achievements (which I did for the "manually pick up 300 trash" achieve).
The settings menu contains a few useful quality of life options, such as changing the click-townsperson behavior from following to pausing, which really helps.
The only minor complaint I have is that the game does get a bit visually cluttered by the end, between the number of people/bikes/cats running around, and how far you have to scroll/pan to see your full street (I had somewhere around 19 or 20 buildings by the end of mission five, and I physically couldn't zoom out far enough to see everything at once). It makes it a little difficult to click on the specific things you want (even though building a service center does help offset the amount of targeted clicking you need to do), and it's another reason why the creative sandbox mode doesn't really work - the game doesn't actually feel designed for large builds.
Overall, though, I enjoyed the six hours I put into the game, and feel like I got my $5 worth.