One More Lawn: Saturday, 5:42 PM, the mower won't start and the beer is warm

A dad wrote to the developer during the demo. His six-year-old son loved the game, but the old man you play was always smoking and drinking beer. The developer added a family friendly mode: the cigarette becomes a lollipop, same hand, same gesture, he licks it instead. The beer becomes a bottle of water.

That is the kind of game this is. Small, attentive, and far funnier than a mowing simulator has any right to be.

Saturday, 5:42 PM. The mower will not start, the beer is warm, and nobody has cut this grass in weeks. You hold the key until the engine coughs to life, switch on the radio strapped to the hood, and off you go. The grass is tall, thick, wind-blown, and it falls blade by blade under the deck, leaving stripes that follow the way you drive. At the end, the game replays the whole job as a timelapse.

The mower cannot reach everything. You climb down, grab the string trimmer and finish along the fence and around that garden gnome. Out of gas? Walk to the can. Nobody is bringing it to you.

Then the neighbours call. Elvira pays well, but she is picky: every blade cut at five centimetres, not one more, and nothing broken, especially not her gnome. She writes you a receipt, with comments. Next comes Rubén's golf course, with greens, fairways and tees, each at its own height, lost balls to fish out of the pond and a wet car park where you can check whether a riding mower can drift. It can. And finally Marcela's island, to mow end to end for a wedding.

The full game adds online co-op for up to six players with proximity voice chat, bigger machines, a map editor and Steam Workshop. The developer states that some sound effects and the radio songs were generated with AI, then selected and mixed by hand; all the visuals are handmade.

At 4.75 euros with the launch discount, 94% positive out of 153 reviews and more than 900 players online the day after launch, it is the bargain of the week.

Broke Elvira's gnome? Confess on the InsertCoins Discord, we will not tell.