Welcome to my Mikeno’s Night Market review. I did not receive a review copy of the game.
Mineko’s Night Market is a business sim-lite with simple puzzle elements, sporting an enchanting “arts and crafts” aesthetic reminiscent of Okami-meets-Tearaway. The game released on Steam and Nintendo Switch in October 2023.
Author’s Note: I bought Mineko’s Night Market on Nintendo Switch before I started reading about the glitches and bugs. I won’t harp on these throughout the whole review but I have added a special “Technical Issues” section to cover some of the most prominent bugs so far.
This review may contain minor spoilers for gameplay and story beats, though I always try not to reveal any major plot twists or surprises.
Mineko’s Night Market: An Introduction
Meet Mineko, a young girl who moves to a new town with her father. Here, she collects and crafts items to sell at the Night Market, a once-weekly event with shopping booths and games. She also meets quirky Bobo, who ropes her into solving the mystery of why the town is crawling with secret agents who keep kidnapping stray cats.
Mineko’s Night Market is a whimsical, silly, and meandering game about being a kid, starting a business, and sabotaging a secret cabal of evil agents harassing your new hometown.
And, yes: you can pet the cats.
First Impressions
When I first saw PR materials for Mineko’s Night Market, I was immediately attracted to the whimsical art style and character design. With soft edges and a bright color palette, it looks like something out of a children’s coloring book. I did myself a disservice by letting my imagination run away with me. The idea of a child attending a Night Market conjured something quiet, haunting, and Ghibli-esc. Instead, the game presents itself as bawdy, goofy, and a bit hurried.
Putting my preconceived notions aside, I dove into the first few weeks of the in-game world. Mineko’s Night Market establishes early on what it’s going to be: a nonsensical time/action management sim with point-and-click puzzles here and there. Packed with chaotic humor and a genuinely fun cast of characters, Mineko’s Night Market encourages you to take things slow and not take yourself too seriously.
Gameplay Loop
The day-to-day action economy is this: gathering a resource (picking flowers, for example) takes a bit of your stamina; you can consume food or drinks 3 times a day to restore stamina; traveling by bus to a different area moves the game from day to evening or evening to night; going to sleep saves your game and ends the day.
Certain weeks will be punctuated with story quests, like helping your dad spruce up the house or thwarting secret agents to unlock a new area. You will also be able to take on NPC fetch requests, gifting them certain items to increase their affection for you. This will net you additional bonuses in the game.
There are minor puzzle elements to the game, like point-and-click problem solving while trying to rescue captured cats from the dastardly secret agents. There are also mini games around some actions, like crafting, forestry, and fishing. Most of them are very, very simple, involving only a few clicks.
Every Saturday is the titular Night Market. Here, you will be given a booth and an opportunity to sell any items you have gathered or crafted throughout the week. You can put items on display and a set number of townsfolk will pop by and haggle for them. The night will culminate in a special event that you will get to participate in, ranging from a cat race to a play.
Most of the gameplay revolves around collecting materials, crafting sell-ables, and making money at your Night Market booth each week. You’ll use your money to upgrade your crafting capabilities or fulfill NPC requests. When you return to the Market, these things will help bolster how much money you are able to make. Thus, the cycle continues.
The early game in particular will feel kind of slow. This is because you are “living for the weekend,” so to speak. The majority of your progress is made each Saturday at the Night Market, which leaves the rest of the week feeling like more of a means to an end. The game soon opens up, giving you more quests and puzzles to tackle during the day. But the first month may drag.
The main quest line has you buy tools in order to unlock areas associated with each tool. For example, buying an axe may unlock a paper forest or a wood forest (yes, the game has both) and a shovel may unlock a beach. Once you own the correct tool, you can reach these new locations using the bus stop. This then opens up different spots on the map for resource gathering at your leisure, which in turn lets you craft new items to sell or use for quests.
Each new area comes with a blocker, though. The space is crawling with secret agents. You have to dodge their watch, navigate maze-like spaces, free the caged cats they are holding hostage, foil a few point-and-click puzzler traps, and collect whatever bounty waits at the end of the map. These sections are easy but dull. I found myself losing lives not because it was difficult but because I grew so impatient with them after the umpteenth encounter. It just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with my time in the game.
Once things start to open up, the game really comes into its own. Gathering resources helps craft items; selling these items helps make money; money buys new tools; tools unlock new areas; new areas reveal new resource types; new resource types beget new crafts; new crafts help complete villager quests, which expands and beautifies the Night Market and town. It is a very satisfying gameplay loop.
You will also have plenty of “ah hah!” moments when it comes to discovering new crafting recipes. You might know you need a terracotta planter, for example, but you don’t have the ability to craft that yet. It’s at the back of your mind until, voila, the right combination of new items, areas, and resources helps you complete a different quest that unlocks the recipe you need. It all falls into place quite nicely, like one domino tipping another and another until a beautiful mosaic spills out onto the floor.
You can find recipes by completing NPC quests, fishing them up in bottles, or building out the various museums (for food, flowers, fish, and gems). The serotonin hits just right when you have been muddling around doing this or that and a recipe you’ve needed for a while pops up. It’s satisfying, clever, and more than a little addicting.
Mineko’s Night Market has the right idea about what cozy gamers find rewarding. Your work directly impacts the environment around you, making you feel more grounded in the small town as the game goes on. Quests might help fix up rundown houses, revitalize museum buildings, add new shops, or attract new residents. This game mechanics cycle also speaks to the “new girl moving to a small town” narrative; you start out feeling alien and unwelcome but slowly become more entwined with your new home.
Between crafting and resource collecting, you will be subjected to a lot of minigames. These minigames are varying degrees of tolerable. Some are fun (paper folding and tree chopping); some are mindless (shaking mulberry trees and fishing); some are finicky and un-fun (wood saw and flower cutting); and others are laggy or glitched (sewing machine and metal detector). There are some really high highs and some really low lows here. Which is pretty much my motto for the game.
Story & Characters
Mineko’s Night Market is packed full of the goofiest cast of characters I’ve seen in a long while. They are memorable in so much as they all seem to have some sort of costume or gimmick or both. You’ll see one kid in a pug bonnet, another in safari clothes, and a man dressed as a fish mascot.
However, the characters are pretty one-note and the most you learn about some of them is their “favorite thing” (bugs, pugs, and boybands, oh my!), but I’ll be darned if I don’t admit that they are at the very least quirky and endearing. There are the occasional winners—like a son who doesn’t want to work in his father’s fish restaurant and so strikes out on his own with your help—but they are few and far between.
Most of the dialogue in the game is quite forced. It is packed with joke after joke, leaving no room for genuine heartfelt moments. Mineko is the “straight man,” with her reacting to the silliness around her like Alice in Wonderland. She knows everyone is off their rocker, even though they don’t seem to see it.
This isn’t a dynamic that I love. Only because it feels like Mineko (and, by proxy, the player) are laughing at and not with these people. Even if they are totally ridiculous—and they undoubtedly are—I didn’t enjoy the feeling that Mineko was somehow better than them just because she chose not to play along.
It was written in a way that was supposed to be funny. But it got tiring very quickly. There were no peaks and valleys of emotion, it was just one straight line: laugh. And I did, at first. And then I stopped. And then there was nothing to reel me in again.
Mineko’s Night Market puts more of an emphasis on story that I would have guessed from the trailers and Steam page tidbits. I was expecting something more in the vein of Stardew Valley or Littlewood, where there is an overarching story but it takes backstage to your day-to-day questing.
I always welcome a narrative-centric approach but this game’s story is…an odd one. I won’t give away more than you will learn from the first in-game week but the gist is this: There is a legend of a mystical Sun Cat named Nikko who went missing many, many years ago. Secret agents working for who-knows-who are crawling around the island, making life difficult for its residents—and their purpose seems to be tied to rumors of Nikko’s reappearance.
You might be wondering: “What does this have to do with the Night Market—you know, the game’s ultimate namesake?” Well, unfortunately: not a lot. Mineko’s Nikko Hunt or Mineko’s Secret Agent Bash would be more accurate titles for the game’s focus. Both awful titles, I know; but at least more truthful.
I came for a game about the Night Market. I both wanted and expected that to be the focus. I can clash with secret agents elsewhere, in many-a game, in fact. But I would not have picked up Mineko’s Night Market had I known that the story was not truly centered around the Night Market itself.
This discordance is particularly noticeable as I grew more and more attached to the town and market, and the game’s story took me further and further away from it. It felt like the gameplay and the narrative didn’t mesh. They are pulling in two different directions and tearing the game at its seams. Everything I did, all the grinding and quests, was to build out the town Mineko now calls home. But the story kept pulling at my sleeve, wanting me to look at a bigger picture I just didn’t care about.
There is a genuinely touching story about home and belonging tucked in there somewhere. But the constant jokes and absurdity detract from what should be a powerful finale.
Technical Issues
Unfortunately, Mineko’s Night Market has been plagued with some pretty serious technical issues since launch. So much so that the developer had to issue an apology online. Here are the reported glitches and bugs so far:
- Glitching graphics and music during load screens (I experienced)
- Unable to speak to or interact with characters on the town map (I experienced)
- Lag while unveiling a town or Night Market improvement (I experienced)
- Extreme lag after using the sewing machine table (I experienced)
- Extreme lag after completing the beach “metal detecting” minigame (I experienced)
- A late stage quest asks you to craft two Nikko Temple Flowers (Perfect) but the items don’t actually have to be “Perfect” to complete the requirements (I experienced)
- Game softlocked after failing the frozen lake area agent minigame/losing all 3 lives (I experienced)
- Game crashes when you mine for gold at one part (Reddit reported)
- Outfits disappearing from the merchant shop and/or your closet (Reddit reported)
- Rio’s hearts and requests resetting, getting stuck at 0 (Reddit reported)
- Giving a gift to one character will instead increase the hearts of another character nearby (Reddit reported)
- Unusually low item spawn rates on Nintendo Switch version (Reddit reported)
- All NPCs reach 5 hearts but the trophy/achievement doesn’t pop (Reddit reported)
- The joystick minigame for paper crafting bugs out and fails the player on Nintendo Switch (Reddit reported)
- Game dialogue incorrectly flags when the Art Craft Table is available for sale (Reddit reported)
- The game becomes unplayable at a certain point on the 2nd floor of the [spoiler] HQ on Nintendo Switch (Reddit reported)
- You incorrectly only receive one clay per paid dig event (Reddit reported)
- Ramen Shop quest glitches the game on Nintendo Switch (Reddit reported)
Summary
Here is a short TLDR of my review of Mineko’s Night Market.
Pros
- The paper cutout aesthetic is charming and unique
- The crafting, selling, collecting cycle is satisfying and cozy
Cons
- The game released laggy and buggy, with many issues persisting even with updates
- The game starts quite slow, with nearly the whole first month feeling activity-barren
- The humor is heavy-handed and omnipresent, leaving me longing for more room for genuineness
- The main plot is not centered around the Night Market, which may leave players feeling swindled
Conclusion
Mineko’s Night Market is a quirky, laidback game with a whip-quick wit and crafty art style. Trying to rush through the game will be met with frustration, though; it is a game that encourages you to slow down and take your time. It is filled with messiness, from the story not quite clicking with what matters most to some minigames that are downright broken, but it is a game that has a lot of heart.
Unfortunately, at this time I cannot recommend that anyone buy Mineko’s Night Market due to the numerous technical issues. While the game is not broken, per se, it is in rough enough shape that no one should pay full price for it until there have been significant updates and patches. I hope this changes one day and will update my review accordingly when and if it does.
If you still want to try it out, here are my final thoughts:
Who Mineko’s Night Market is for:
- Players who like slower games, like Animal Crossing
- Players who like silly, irreverent humor
- Cat lovers
Who Mineko’s Night Market is not for:
- Players who get bored with repetition
- Players expecting a serious or grounded tone
- Players who want to be challenged by the puzzles and miniquests
Stay cozy, gamers!
If you liked Minako’s Night Market, you might also like Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story.