Are others always promoted ahead of you, while your hard work has gone unnoticed? Are you but a rodent in this constant rat race that we call life? Do you feel the suffocating hand of capitalism closing around you, while deforestation and gentrification rein eternal in the background? Then Nintendo has made the game just for you.
Your protagonist has crash landed on a planet after colliding with a comet. With the vessel breaking apart as it came down, Captain Olimar must collect the scattered pieces from the wreckage if he has any chance of getting home. But with time ticking he only has 30 days to do so before his life support runs out…
Pikmin is a collect-em-all/adventure game. Intentionally, Olimar himself is only given the single basic attack move to be used as a last resort as the game sees you leading a small army of bug-eyed plant creatures (the “Pikmin” – named after a carrot brand Olimar enjoys back home) who will gather all the ship pieces needed for this marooned space captain to get the heck off the planet.
Pikmin is all about its critters. Whole ecosystems scutter about in gigantic earthy textures, while its animal life dominate to eat, thrive and survive. Nintendo, for all of their recycling (again and again) of winning formulas live and breathe cute character design, with its Pikmin just one more sterling example of many, alongside Olimar as a mash up of Mario and Buzz Lightyear.
The Pikmin themselves – while adorable – give off the senseless conformity of the kind of thing that would grow on food if you left it out too long – while simultaneously the exact kind of creature that would plot and steal said food from the counter if left unattended.
Able to reach 100 Pikmin at a time, you are these multi-colored monsters’ leader. You command the expendable contingent to carry equipment, fight, and ultimately die (with strangely detailed animations seen of Pikmin burning to death in this genuinely treacherous landscape), as you colonize this planet and generally harvest its resources, destroy its infrastructure and kill its livestock for your own personal needs.
As Nintendo perfected the art of doing nothing in Animal Crossing New Horizons recently, Pikmin’s landscapes use a similar kind of natural beauty in its lakes, blocky hilltops and undergrounds but add an element of danger perhaps not expected from merely checking out the box art in your local Target. Between grassy knolls and the game’s zen musical queues, necessary tension is added to the mix with its timer ticking away at the top of the screen and forcing you to not dally and hurry up before nightfall.
And there is a genuine need for multitasking here to work your way through the game efficiently. As one set of Pikmin knock down a wall, say, others will need to be used to transport back a piece of tech to the ship. Using the Pikmin for their attributes will become essential, as red Pikmin walk effortlessly through fire, yellows transport bombs and blues navigate your water sections.
All the while, ladybird monsters with stalk eyes awake only to devour your flock, nocturnal pig creatures spit fire, fish snap, screen filling pod-spiders stomp and underground creatures burrow up to try and kill you; all becoming bigger in size as you progress meaning that becoming familiar with the lay of the land will only help as you return to levels.
Pikmin’s downside is that after the first 20 minutes, you’re only in for more of the same right up until its finale. There’s not a huge amount of variety beyond: Land on planet, attack, collect items, repeat. As the enemies do grow larger and more dangerous it keeps things exciting, but it remains the same a-to-b mission, regardless of the level (something the sequels would naturally only try and remedy by adding more characters, Pikmin, dungeons and scrapping the time limit altogether).
Pikmin can become a little samey after a while, but with a slim playtime and so much to look at now is a perfect time to revisit the game before Pikmin 4 drops for summer this year.
Pikmin is worth a try if:
- Cute critters
- Nintendo is your jam anyway
- You like Ridley Scott’s hit 2015 film, “The Martian”
Give it a pass if:
- Animal Crossing is already just too intense
- Fictional animal deaths are too much
- You need constant variety in your gameplay [lasso ref=”pikmin-4-nintendo-switch” id=”23929″ link_id=”4279″]
