Munshi Meadows

If you spent more of Sonic Adventure in the Chao Garden than in the rest of the game, this one is for you.

Munshi Meadows is a garden full of little creatures that are yours to raise. Each one hatches from an egg, grows into something that depends on how you raised it, and then goes racing, fighting and puzzling for you across fourteen cups. Between races they live their own lives in your garden. They nap, swim, squabble, fall in love and make eggs of their own, so after a while the place is full of a family you can trace back to your first two.



Every Munshi starts as an egg. Once it hatches it is yours: feed it, pet it, carry it about, and play with it on the toys in your garden. The treadmill, the hurdles, the swimming lane, the puzzle table, the sky trampoline and the high striker are each a little game you play together, and each one trains a different skill. Hazel, the keeper who shows you round on your first day, will tell you which to start with and then leave you to it.

Each Munshi has a nature of its own, shy or grumpy or greedy or one of eight others, and you see it all day long. The lazy one is asleep under a tree again. The mischievous one has pushed somebody in the pond. After a couple of hours a pup grows up, and what it becomes depends on what you trained, so a swimmer and a runner from the same nest grow into two different animals. There are 34 forms to find, most with a Light, a Neutral and a Dark side, plus a secret one for a Munshi that did nothing but swim, and three more for a Munshi that mastered everything, where its heart decides.


Two grown Munshis and a piece of fruit in the Breeding Hut make an egg, and the shell already shows what is coming: the coat, the markings and the eyes.

Looks run in families. A pup takes its coat, its pattern, its eye colour and even the shape of its pupils, round, slit, star or heart, from its parents. Every Munshi also carries a second set it never shows, so two blue-eyed parents can hatch a green-eyed pup if one of them carries green, and a grandparent's spots can turn up two generations later. Some patterns only ever come from breeding: put stripes together with speckles and you might get Lightning. The really rare things stay rare. About one Munshi in a thousand is born with odd eyes.

The Clinic keeps the family tree and will tell you what each Munshi carries, and the Pattern Book keeps count of every coat, pattern and eye colour that has lived in your garden. If you want to steer it, four fruits each pin one trait from the parent you choose, and Rare Nectar nudges a pup's markings toward the rare ones. Breed with a friend's Munshi and you are more likely to see a pattern neither of you has.



A Munshi lives for eight hours in your garden. When its time is up it comes back as a pup, keeping everything it learned plus a little extra, and its markings spread a little further over its coat with every life. At the end of its third life you choose: keep it just as it is, for good, or let it come back one last time in a final form that depends on the heart it showed along the way.



Races test five things, running, swimming, climbing, flying and wits, and every course wants a different mix, so the Munshi that flew through the water gets stuck halfway up a cliff. The first cup is easy runs through the countryside, and it gets stranger from there: glowing caves, the inside of a live volcano, a sunken kingdom where you swim right through a whale, a dinosaur stampede, a frozen mountain range, a neon city in the rain, a candy carnival floating in space, and a castle too tall for its mountain. Seventy courses over fourteen cups, with a race caller shouting the whole way, and the very last one is a dream your Munshi has about every place it ever raced.



It isn't all racing, and there is always something to go to between training sessions. Every world has a fighting championship and puzzle trials, best of three against the toughest rival in the field. Some of the fights are cage matches where anything goes, ladders and top-rope dives included, called by an announcer who keeps reminding everyone there are children watching. Thistle & Turnbuckle in town sells a weapon for the ring and an item for the track, and more comes into stock as your Munshis win. When one is ready, send it into the Gauntlet: all seventy courses, shuffled, three hearts, and a boon to pick after every race. See how far it gets.



Dig ponds and lakes, plant fruit trees, put out swings and slides and a Ferris wheel, take ten Munshis out on the party boat or sit them all down for movie night. You don't have to lead them to any of it. They find it on their own, and at least one of them will still be bouncing on the trampoline when the rest have gone to bed in the Bunkhouse. Keep five gardens with ten Munshis in each. Win a whole cup on Expert and that world becomes a garden theme, a mushroom grotto, a garden among the stars, a sunken temple, seventeen in all.



Forty-eight things to wear, from straw hats and top hats to star-shaped shades and a dragon scarf. Button & Bow in town sells about half of them, your Munshis win the rest, and they keep them on when they race. Beat every race, fight and puzzle and you can build a Paint Hut, where any Munshi can be any colour you like.


Open your garden and friends can drop by over Steam or your local network to have a look round, race you, step into the ring, do the puzzle trials side by side, or pair up two Munshis and see what hatches. Quick Race finds other keepers on Steam and puts you on the same start line.

• Hazel shows a new keeper round in her own voice, and a race caller and a fight announcer call every race and bout
  
• Music by a human composer
  
• 59 Steam achievements and full controller support
  
• In English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, German, French and Russian
  
• A free demo: the first two cups, an hour, your own garden