Life of Mellow is a free strategy mobile video game wherein you must help a community of cute-looking critters survive an unfamiliar place. Developed by MondayOFF, this 2D simulation game has you assigning tasks to your village members in order to prepare for the coming seasons. 

Similar to Virtual Villagers: Origins, Life of Mellow is mostly about time and resource management gameplay. However, it doesn’t have a pause button so you have to act quickly when you come across a problem. Additionally, the game doesn’t have a built-in tutorial to easily guide you.

It takes a village

In Life of Mellow, you are put in charge of a group of hapless marshmallow-looking creatures who have been swept away in a tornado and must now survive by building a village. In the beginning, you have three save slots and can buy more. There are five game modes available, differentiated by the number of resources you start off with—and anything other than Basic Mode is purchasable.

You start off with three Mellows and can gradually gain more by either taking in wandering Mellows or getting your female Mellows pregnant. The main goal is to survive for as long as possible during the four seasons that continuously cycle. You have to build houses, gather food and other resources, and hunt in order to keep your villagers hale and hearty. You do this by assigning jobs to them. 

For its concept, this game is easy enough to follow. However, its main drawback is that—unlike similar games—it doesn’t have an in-game tutorial to quickly let you know what are the controls. This is a serious issue as the game has no pause button and you waste precious time trying to figure things out. It does offer YouTube tutorial videos for each task but it redirects you from the app.

Badly needs a tutorial

All in all, Life of Mellow is a nice little resource-management game but it’s not optimized to its fullest potential. While the gameplay is easy enough to understand, the controls aren’t readily available for you to learn due to the game’s lack of a built-in tutorial. If you really want to play it, it’s advised that you watch all of the tutorial videos in one go first.