Munshi Meadows

Munshi Meadows is a creature-raising game about hatching Munshis, training them in your garden and entering them in races, fights and puzzle trials. Each Munshi grows into a form shaped by how you raised it, while living alongside the others in the garden. You can keep five gardens, each with up to ten Munshis.

Raise your Munshis

Every Munshi starts as an egg. After it hatches, you can feed, pet and carry it, and play training games together on the treadmill, hurdles, swimming lane, puzzle table, sky trampoline and high striker. Each activity trains a different skill. Hazel, the keeper who guides you around on your first day, recommends where to start.

Munshis have distinct natures: shy, grumpy, greedy and eight others. Their personalities shape their daily lives, from napping under trees to pushing one another into the pond. After a couple of hours, a pup grows up into a form influenced by its training, so siblings raised differently can become different animals. There are 34 forms, most with Light, Neutral and Dark sides, plus a secret form for a Munshi that only swam and three forms for one that mastered everything, determined by its heart.

A Munshi lives in your garden for eight hours. When its time is up, it returns as a pup with everything it learned and a little extra. Its markings spread further over its coat with each life. At the end of its third life, you can keep it as it is permanently or let it return for one final life in a form shaped by the heart it showed.

Breed and track traits

Two adult Munshis and a piece of fruit in the Breeding Hut produce an egg whose shell shows the pup's coming coat, markings and eyes. Pups inherit their parents' coats, patterns, eye colours and pupil shapes, which can be round, slit, star or heart. Each Munshi also carries hidden traits, so a pup can inherit a colour or pattern from a grandparent. Some patterns only appear through breeding; combining stripes and speckles, for example, might produce Lightning. About one Munshi in a thousand is born with odd eyes.

The Clinic records each Munshi's family tree and hidden traits, while the Pattern Book tracks every coat, pattern and eye colour that has appeared in your garden. Four fruits can each pin a chosen trait from one parent, and Rare Nectar nudges a pup's markings towards rarer patterns. Breeding with a friend's Munshi makes it more likely that the pup will have a pattern neither of you has.

Race, fight and puzzle

Races test running, swimming, climbing, flying and wits, with each course demanding a different mix of skills. The 70 courses are divided among 14 cups, starting with countryside runs and moving through places such as glowing caves, a live volcano, a sunken kingdom where you swim through a whale, a dinosaur stampede, a frozen mountain range, a rainy neon city, a candy carnival floating in space and a castle taller than its mountain. The final course is a dream that brings together every place your Munshi has raced. A race caller comments throughout.

Each world also has a fighting championship and puzzle trials. Both are best-of-three contests against the toughest rival in the field. Some fights are cage matches with ladders and top-rope dives, called by an announcer who keeps reminding the crowd that children are watching. Thistle & Turnbuckle in town sells weapons for the ring and items for the track, adding more stock as your Munshis win.

Ready Munshis can enter the Gauntlet, which sends them through all 70 courses in shuffled order. They have three hearts and can choose a boon after every race. You can also enter Quick Race to be matched with other keepers on Steam.

Build your garden

You can dig ponds and lakes, plant fruit trees and add swings, slides and a Ferris wheel. Send ten Munshis on the party boat or gather them for movie night; they find these activities on their own. They can also use the Bunkhouse, though one might still be bouncing on the trampoline after the others have gone to bed.

Winning a whole cup on Expert unlocks that world's garden theme. There are 17 themes, including a mushroom grotto, a garden among the stars and a sunken temple. You can also collect 48 wearable items, from straw hats and top hats to star-shaped shades and a dragon scarf. Button & Bow in town sells about half; Munshis win the rest and keep them on while racing. After you beat every race, fight and puzzle, you can build a Paint Hut and choose any colour for any Munshi.

Visit with friends

You can open your garden to friends over Steam or a local network. They can look around, race you, join you in the ring, take on puzzle trials alongside you or pair two Munshis to see what hatches.

Hazel guides new keepers in her own voice, and both the race caller and fight announcer comment on every race and bout.