Piko Piko

Piko Piko

released on Aug 14, 2019

Piko Piko

released on Aug 14, 2019

Take control of Piko, our hammer wielding heroine, as you bash things up with a big hammer in this cute Anime-styled 2D metroidvania-inspired adventure! Uncover mysteries! Beat the bad guys who do naughty things! Explore the Piko Piko world with her floof fox friend!


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This game finally got out of Early Access and I can safely say -- still a train wreck.

-- Music doesn't play at all (switching ON or OFF does nothing, volume is at max)

-- Sometimes your down smash just goes off without your permission while jumping and this can lead to a lot of lost progress when you're trying to carefully platform UPWARDS

-- Pits that auto-kill you in a game that encourages you to explore in multiple directions (this is easily one of the dumbest features I've ever seen in a game)

-- Some pits are pits but don't advertise themselves as such because some kinds of weird behaviors are happening right at the bottom of the screen to indicate that stuff SHOULD be down there

-- The boss that didn't do anything before when I fought her? Still doesn't do anything

-- The Dash Power-Up is in multiple locations and I'm not entirely sure if this is intended or not

-- You're not given any indication of what any power-ups do

-- If you choose a windowed resolution and hit the MAP button at any point, the resolution changes to fullscreen and does not change back

-- There's still no way to quit out other than hard-closing the program from outside

-- See an area that you need to crawl through but don't have the power up you need? Just lean into it, then try and do a down-smash and you'll fling yourself through. Beware that sometimes this results in you being stuck in a weird crawl animation and unable to jump or move in any direction but forward. Fun times!

-- My assist character and I both vanished off the screen at one point after walking to one side of the room. It seems we just left the plane of existence and there was no way back. After a few jumps, I stopped hearing sounds to indicate movement progress. Map command still worked, so I tried entering and exiting that to get back, no dice. Had to hard-quit the game (just like quitting normally!).

This game is an atrocious mess and I cannot recommend it in its "complete" state. It's unbelievable how bad the game is.
Original review follows.
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My first 30 minutes of this game summed up briefly:

-- Double jump sometimes works, sometimes doesn't and the only correlation I can find is that it sometimes fails when your companion is also jumping around

-- Companion occasionally gets stuck on things or stuck in random animations and does nothing until you progress far enough away from them to have them catch back up with you

A series of short events en masse:

-- After getting my companion, I decided to go right instead of left because I like exploration and found some neat upper paths that I used my double-jump + down-hammer to get up to.

-- Got to a boss and made short work of her. Her AI didn't really do anything other than walk into me.

-- Went right and got a power-up that let me slide under things (though it gave no indication that it did this nor bothered to explain how).

-- Tried to go back to a save room on my map and when I got to the room, didn't see anything indicating a save point and didn't remember seeing one in that room on my map when I came through the first time.

-- Figured maybe it was below the conveyor belts I jumped across, so I dropped down below them to see what was down there.

-- Surprise, it's actually a pit that instakills you and returns you back to your last save and wipes all your progression you made!

The game's still in Early Access on Steam, so maybe there will be some intuitive changes made to address some of the bad logic going on here, but we'll see. The fact that the game uses key prompts (C and X) on the menu while you're using a gamepad isn't inspiring, but worse still is that while you're on the map page, the map moves while you're trying to scroll down the sidebar options to the left of the map because it doesn't function independently of the sidebar. Whoops.

Will throw it back into the backlog, but yeah...the game is both simultaneously too easy and too poorly designed to want to play more at this point.