Simple, but it works? Is I guess, the best description I've got for Pikuniku. It's not the deepest or longest puzzle platformer out there, but it never feels repetitive or becomes dull in the few hours it takes to complete. It's light and breezy entertainment.
The esoteric humour also keeps the game rolling along nicely. The antagonist has a bizarre preoccupation with corn, and you'll need to defeat a foe on the dance floor, that sort of thing. Your character has a soft penchant for mayhem and causing chaos, which adds another layer of charm, didn't experiment enough to see if any of this could be avoided.
Pikuniku uses curved-edged vector visuals as opposed to pixel art. It's a nice change-up. Guessing they might have been inspired by LocoRoco and few obscure Dreamcast titles. The worst part of the game is a Dig Dug riff that falls pretty flat and lacks a mechanic to make it unique.
Not sure if anyone will be blown away, but it's silly and has dumb jokes.
Got Pikuniku for free on the Epic Games Store. Not a bad pickup on Steam at the time of writing this, as it's 70% off.
The esoteric humour also keeps the game rolling along nicely. The antagonist has a bizarre preoccupation with corn, and you'll need to defeat a foe on the dance floor, that sort of thing. Your character has a soft penchant for mayhem and causing chaos, which adds another layer of charm, didn't experiment enough to see if any of this could be avoided.
Pikuniku uses curved-edged vector visuals as opposed to pixel art. It's a nice change-up. Guessing they might have been inspired by LocoRoco and few obscure Dreamcast titles. The worst part of the game is a Dig Dug riff that falls pretty flat and lacks a mechanic to make it unique.
Not sure if anyone will be blown away, but it's silly and has dumb jokes.
Got Pikuniku for free on the Epic Games Store. Not a bad pickup on Steam at the time of writing this, as it's 70% off.
I kept waiting for the “real” game to start, because it was pitched to me as one of those “I wouldn’t want to spoil what this game really is” titles in the vein of Frog Fractions or something. It’s not. What you get in the first village is more or less what you can expect the rest of it to be: a not particularly challenging platform adventurer with an ultraminimalist aesthetic and affectation you’ll either find cutesy or grating (I was somewhere in between).
I appreciate the anti-capitalist themes and some of the humor, but there wasn’t enough weight to this world or its characters to keep me invested in the mechanics, which put me off pretty early. I felt like I spent most of my time wandering around looking for objects I’d missed, hopping consequence-free (except for the consequence of missing a high jump and having to make a long walk back) from cloud to cloud around largely empty environments. Ultimately there’s not a lot of “there” there.
I appreciate the anti-capitalist themes and some of the humor, but there wasn’t enough weight to this world or its characters to keep me invested in the mechanics, which put me off pretty early. I felt like I spent most of my time wandering around looking for objects I’d missed, hopping consequence-free (except for the consequence of missing a high jump and having to make a long walk back) from cloud to cloud around largely empty environments. Ultimately there’s not a lot of “there” there.