The car pathfinding is simple, yet effective: each house spawns with two cars which will eventually spend the majority of their time travelling to and from a destination, and while they’re doing that they can’t do anything else, so the game finds the nearest house with an unoccupied car based on the number of road tiles separating it from its goal and tells it to get moving. This isn’t really a “lose” condition, because it’s the only way a game of Mini Motorways can end and you’ll always succumb to it sooner or later because of the way the traffic volume in your city seems to grow at a geometric rate - but thanks to that same exponential growth, staving off the end of the game by just a couple more minutes can lead to more successful journeys being made in that period than in the entirety of the game leading up to that point. You’re scored on the number of journeys your cars successfully make over the course of the game, so you already have an incentive to ensure the efficient flow of traffic around the city to maximise this number, but Mini Motorways also introduces a pretty large stick: if a journey pin languishes on a building for too long - say because the car that’s trying to fulfil it has to drive from the other side of the map and got caught up in gridlock along the way because of the two hundred other cars also trying to fulfil their journey pins - then the game ends. As the game progresses more houses spawn along with more destination buildings of different colours, all of which must be connected to one another via roads so that the ever-growing number of journey pins can be dealt with. For each pin, a car will drive from the nearest house matching the destination’s colour and, when it arrives, the pin will vanish. If left unattended the destination building will slowly start to accrue pins that represent a journey somebody wants to make to it the pins can be cleared by building a road between the house and the destination so that cars can travel between the two. Every game of Mini Motorways starts by spawning two things onto a blank map: a small coloured house with two cars parked inside it, and a larger destination building matching the colour of the house, which I guess is supposed to represent a generic office or skyscraper or something. Let’s get into the basic mechanics so that I can explain why. It’s not that I have, in some feat of promethean intelligence, somehow solved the entire game and made further runs redundant - my proficiency with the puzzle genre is middling at best - but rather that, because of the limited number of tools and levers available to me as a player, the most reliable path towards “solving” Mini Motorways is one that I have no interest in pursuing. By contrast I’ve gone through all of Mini Motorways’ dozen city seeds now, and I don’t have the urge to play it any more. There is a fine balance to be struck here, and the games that carry it off tend to make it look deceptively easy I am reminded of last year’s A Monster’s Expedition, which took the basic concept of rolling logs around small islands and successfully spun it out into a 900-level game without it ever getting boring or stale. The more that I play Mini Motorways, though, the more I’m thinking that there was a significant price paid in exchange for its incredible aesthetic qualities: it’s taken the abstraction and simplification of its subject matter way too far to be an engaging long-term prospect as a puzzle game. It’s a pleasure to look at, a pleasure to interact with, and a pleasure to play.

I have worked in several organisations that would kill to be able to express the core purpose of their product as simply and as naturally as Mini Motorways does. I have no doubt that when an iOS developer goes to sleep at night, they dream of things that look very much like Mini Motorways - and not without good reason, either, since Mini Motorways is in many ways the Holy Grail of UX design. The game is an extraordinary aesthetic achievement - a perfect blend of rounded edges, pastel colours, minimalist interface and intuitive touch-centric controls that seems to have been laser-targeted at Apple’s UX designers with the intention of sending them into paroxysms of orgasmic joy. It is not remotely surprising to me that Mini Motorways was immediately snapped up by Apple for a couple of years’ exclusivity on Apple Arcade.

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