Mini Metro – The Most Relaxing Game Ever

We all have those days. You feel tired for one reason or another. A long day at work or maybe you’re feeling a little under the weather. You want to wind down and play a game, but nothing overly complicated or taxing. Fortunately, Mini Metro exists and is possibly the most relaxing game ever.

For everyone who has played Mini Metro before I’m talking about Endless mode here. This mode unlike any of the other equally brilliant parts of the game has no fail state. You can just continue to expand, refine and enjoy the little subway you’ve created. Usually, you have to deal with congestion. This means that slowly people will get grumpy because their train is taking too long to arrive. When they become mega-grumpy and file a complaint with the transport commission, it’s game over. This is fine, and it starts off nice and relaxed. Everything is all lovely jubbly, in say Osaka, but inevitably somewhere isn’t quite as efficient as it should be and people start to complain. And then, Mini Metro flips from relaxing to stressful, and some days that is just too much stress to handle.

So stay with me here, I promise Endless mode is different. Pick a city that takes your fancy. Maybe today you want to play with bridges instead of tunnels as you create lovely tram lines instead. Mini Metro has you dragging various coloured lines for your engines to run on and each one depicts a shape. These can be anything from a circle and square to a star and diamond. Each shaped station is going to have shaped passengers who want to go to their corresponding location. Triangles to triangles and so on. Each time you reach a new milestone of passengers taken to their stations you get some new toys to play with. This could be more carriages, new tracks and trains or even something special like an interchange station that makes it easier for large numbers of passengers to pass through a specific place. In Endless mode, you are left to tinker with this lovely visual puzzle entirely stress-free.

Thanks to the Endless mode it doesn’t matter if you have congestion or people start to get angry. The nice thing about the Endless mode is that the complaints desk is always closed and all those little shapes can do is suck it up and wait for the next available train. That isn’t to say you can just haphazardly place tracks – well you could, but then you’d miss out on the other beautiful thing about Endless Mode. What you want to do is refine this puzzle continually. New stations are constantly popping up across the map and others will be changing to different shapes. This causes you to carefully consider the best way of laying out your tracks. Add to this, new lines that will have you wanting to reconfigure everything all over again, Mini Metro’s Endless mode lets you fiddle with this electric train set to your heart’s content.

That is one of the main attractions for playing Mini Metro in Endless mode. While the regular sessions let you create a train set with the pressure of what it could be like to run a real subway, it also smashes that same train set to pieces the moment people start to arrive a mere hour or two late to work each day. Endless mode is more similar to the train set you might have had a kid. You can constantly change and set it up in the way that you want without any passengers complaining about how they missed another friend’s wedding because you didn’t have any tunnels left to connect their station that specific week.

One last fantastic thing about Mini Metro is that while it is available on PC and Mac, it is also on Android and iOS. You can just slump on the sofa and tap away on your tablet and play with this lovely train set. I nearly forgot to mention the relaxing and Zen-like music that plays throughout each session; it’s lovely. Endless mode is one of the best ways to relax and relive the enjoyment of playing with a train set as a child. Play it, it’s excellent.