Mineko's Night Market

🇳🇱 NL 🇬🇧 EN

Wake me up any time for a good, engaging cozy game on my Nintendo Switch 2. With so much on offer these days, it's genuinely hard to spot which new release is actually worth your time. So I wanted to introduce you to Mineko's Night Market, a cozy game that blends several elements: crafting, gathering materials, interacting with characters, solving problems, and much more. What does the game look like, and what will you actually be doing?

The start of Mineko's Night Market

Like a lot of games, you move to a new place. In this case, Mineko moves to a new town with her father, where they get to start over. Except the place they end up in has a bit of a grim atmosphere. There are plenty of agents lurking around, lots of shops are empty or closed, and the residents live in very simple homes. It quickly becomes clear that you're the one who's going to slowly drive out the secret agents and solve the cat mystery.
The village you live in needs quite a bit of attention. Your house could use a makeover, and so could the somewhat grim-looking museums and the residents' homes. So your first priority is gathering materials. You can take the bus to various locations to collect different materials. Some locations you first need to unlock by completing a mission, which drives the secret agents away.

Gathering materials

Gathering materials is, I'd say, the biggest foundation of Mineko's Night Market. Once you've collected materials, you can fulfill requests from residents, craft items, and resell them at the shop or at the weekly market. To gather materials you need to take the bus — which only departs from your home town — to an available location. Right now I'm at a point where I really have to work for it to progress in the game and unlock more locations. I need a specific material for pottery (clay, I think), but I can't get my hands on any clay yet. Anyway, let me show you some of the in-game locations.

The locations

Home: This is your home base. Here you'll find seasonal flowers, fellow residents, a shop, your house, the market, museums, and more.
The Gardens: In the garden you'll find various seasonal flowers as well as cat hairballs. Flowers and hairballs are the most important materials for crafting early on.
The Dock: At the harbor/dock you'll find a fish stall and a food stall. At the fish stall you can sell fish, and at the food stall you can, shockingly, buy food — mostly sushi. This is where you fish from the pier. You can sell fish, but you can also squeeze it to make ink.
Dark Forest: In this forest you'll mostly find wood.
Birch Forest: This forest also has wood, but birch wood specifically. With a special machine you have to buy, you can eventually turn this wood into paper. With that paper you can craft new and different items to sell.
The Caves: These are the first caves you unlock. In these caves you'll mainly find Dullite rocks and occasionally Sparkly rocks. It's also worth collecting the flowers and hairballs found outside.
Cat Farm: This is a farm full of cats. You get a limited amount of time to collect as many hairballs as possible.
Orchard: In this orchard you shake the trees. Branches and/or mulberries fall out. You use the branches for crafting items, and you can eat the berries.
Beach: On the beach you use a metal detector to dig up sand and, hopefully, other treasures.
Metal Cave: In this cave you find metal rocks. xD You can eventually melt these down into metal bars. This cave also has special minerals and gemstones.
Bamboo Forest: Pretty self-explanatory — this is where you gather bamboo. This location consists of large bamboo stalks lying in a forest. It's a location you unlock by rescuing cats and dodging secret agents.
The Nikko Temple: Not really a place where you gather materials, more a place where you bring materials to. Here you help build various temples in order to progress to the next phase of the game.

Crafting items

Depending on how far you are in the game and what materials you've gathered, you can craft items at home. To craft items you need special crafting tables. You unlock the flower table pretty early on, where you can cut flowers to craft items with what you've collected. So far, these are the crafting tables I have:

– Flower: Here you craft items using flowers. The more other materials you have, like wood, the more elaborate and complex the items get. During "flower arranging" you have to cut the stem at just the right moment.
– Paper: Pretty self-explanatory too. At this station you have to fold in the correct direction.
– Sewing: This is the sewing machine where you can craft various fabric items. For this you mainly need (a lot of) hairballs and different colors of dye.
– Wood: Woodworking! To get a nice wooden item, you have to cut the plank of wood at just the right moment.
– Art: Mostly painting. Here you guide the brush along the correct path across the paper.
– Gem: Crafting beautiful jewelry.
– Pottery: Pottery, though I haven't been able to try this yet — I still don't have the key ingredient.

The better the item you've made, the more money it earns at the market. Sometimes you need to craft a specific item to progress in the game. For instance, right now the shopkeeper wants a Sumi-e Flower Painting, but I still don't have pink dye. Once I can give her that painting, she'll start selling new crafting tables.

The market is the weekly event you're working toward. At first there are only a limited number of stalls at the market. As your sales go well (and you can negotiate if you want to), more and more stalls open up. The more you sell, the higher your market's level gets. Why does that matter? A higher level lets you sell more at the market, but also buy more — things like out-of-season flowers, or food you still need to complete the museum. On top of the market, you can also build relationships with the residents outside of it. Sometimes they'll ask for something you can only buy at the market. It's a bit of trial and error figuring out what sells best and what's worth spending your money on.
You'll often need that money fairly urgently for special tools and/or a crafting table. To go into a cave, for example, you need a pickaxe.

Tips and tricks

I could keep going for a while, but this isn't meant to turn into a full gameplay walkthrough. Below are a few more things I've picked up along the way.
– Don't sell materials too quickly: processed materials earn you more, you'll also want to fill up the museums, and some materials are seasonal — you'll need them out of season for crafting later.
– Why fill up the museums? It attracts more visitors.
– Your character can walk, sneak, and run. Check which buttons do this on your console — some missions genuinely require sneaking.
– Outside of your home town, you can visit a maximum of two locations at once.
– Bring food and/or drinks wherever you go, otherwise you'll need to head home fairly quickly.
– When selling materials to a shop, you can only select one type of material at a time — not the most efficient system.
– I think this is a game best played in short daily sessions!