There are so many demos to sift through during Nextfest, so I take a lot of information off of Twitter to make informed decisions on what demos I will be looking for. This week I decided to land on a cozier game involving tourism. This week is Minami Lane.

Minami Lane is a life management sim from Doot and Blibloop. The game will be releasing February 28th for the PC.

Minami Lane is a small street that badly needs expanding. Build shops, homes, parks, and other structures to allow the street to thrive.

Minami Lane is a simple, cozy concept but when introduced to the meat of the game, the challenges, then cozy takes a backseat. Minami Lane opens up by building a ramen restaurant and it shows the player’s day in the life as cute, tiny pedestrians funnel in from off-screen and homes on the street to tackle the day, eating and observing the beauty of your street.

Buildings are locked behind challenge barriers like achieving 70% satisfaction and having $250 to buy the boba shop. But the real challenge is the criteria to complete the levels in the demo.

The demo offers a few challenges to the player to maximize the understanding of the deeper systems at play. Why are people happy with your street? Well click on them and see what they have to say about it. There might not be enough beauty to lighten up the dreary city-like atmosphere. Maybe they didn’t like the boba or the ramen shop selection.

You can customize almost anything. There is quite a lot of depth to the game.

After the day is done a graph appears with stats about the day. Things like how many people visited your businesses and parks, how much money was made, progress towards the current objective, and overall satisfaction. It is informative and helps with tweaking your business to attract more visitors and make the most money.

Minami Lane is really colorful. Pastel colors flood the screen, making the game really easy on the eyes. even the menu screens have a light beige tint to them, so it never really hurts to look at.

Minami Lane is a nice cozy game to play when you have some time to kill. In-game days are short and can be fast-forwarded. Everything is simplified, from upgrading and customizing to placing structures and accessing the menu. There are times when fast-forwarding through the day is encouraged to save time when finishing up the final task, but, for the most part, letting the day just go by is relaxing enough on its own. Picking up trash for coins, petting cats, and finding the Tanuki are optional but help with passing time while the people do their thing on the street.

It is hard to not recommend this game because there were multiple times when I said that I was going to be done playing but I pressed on for “just one more day” and it turned out that I just kept on playing.

Minami Lane is a good start to February’s Steam Nextfest.