[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Minestrone through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
I'm not really sure what to make of Minestrone. Is it an experimental walking-sim? Is it a tech demo? Is it a resume builder? I wouldn't expect the game to be immediately Steam Deck compatible and even after trying more than five different compatibility options, starting with Proton Experimental and working my way down the list, I eventually settled on Proton [x] because I wasn't experiencing any difference. The biggest problems I experienced during the game were that there was significant audio clipping and that the game maxed out at 16 frames per second. Because this is a walking-sim, 16 fps is still playable.
The purpose of the game is to follow a trail of what I assume to be tomatoes through an Italian city and collect ingredients from people who have a green "Talk to me" text floating above them until you have collected everything. Your tomato collection meter counts up from one to 99 and none of the tomatoes were hidden in a way that became frustrating or difficult to find. One thing that remains unclear to me is what the actual goal is, to collect 99 tomatoes, or to talk to everyone to collect the specific ingredients like garlic, thyme, and olive oil? In the game, when I collected the last tomato before I talked to the last person, the game said that I had found the final ingredient, "Good work! Your recipe is complete." And then immediately after I talked to my final NPC and the game continued until I manually quit.
The only other thing of note in the game is the NPC animations, which while incredibly blurry were very fluid and felt more lifelike than many NPCs in other modern games I've played in recent years. The NPCs didn't necessarily look like they were part of the environment in that they existed within the environment but were not active with elements such as buildings, tables, or chairs. Their animations would also loop after several seconds, but since there was only one line of dialogue per NPC, there was never a reason to stand around and watch the animations loop.
That's really all that there is to Minestrone. I completed the game in just under 16 minutes and then walked around for nearly another five minutes to see if I had missed anything. The description on Steam suggests that there are hidden easter eggs, although apart from one closed storefront with Archor Games, and an in-world advertisement telling me to check out Archor Games on Steam, I don't know what else there was so it's likely that I missed something deeper, or just another another ad.
And really, maybe that's all that Minestrone is. Just another ad for Archor Games to be like, "Hey, we can make a walking-sim in Unreal Engine 5.5."
And to watch all 20 minutes of my playthrough, I've included it below:
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