Pikmin if it were good. Tinykin's a fun collectathon platformer, and I love the tiny characters in a full sized house theme. Unlocking abilities primarily through finding new types of Tinykin is fun and there were a decent amount of unique ideas there. The level design is really the highlight I think, the environments feel really different and how ordinary rooms of a house are transformed into something else in the eyes of the bug inhabitants here is really cool. I do have a couple of minor complaints. The collectathon aspect is fun (as someone who generally likes these) up until the last few things to find in each level. There really aren't any good tools to help hunt down what you're missing, and I spent a significant chunk of my playtime scouring mostly completed levels, before eventually giving up and just getting 95% completion or something like that. This is also unfortunately the only real challenge in the game, I was hoping for a bit more of (optional?) platforming challenges in the late game or some kind of postgame content. It was a nice length overall but just lacking something near the end in that way. Also wasn't a fan of the writing and the dialogue was a bit too much for my taste. You kind of need to talk to everyone in case they offer a side quest, but I ended up mashing through a lot of it because there's a lot of dry flavor text. It also reuses objectives a bit much for my taste, like the mail you can collect in every level, or one of the side quests always being to find a ring in some side area and bring it back to someone. Even just reskinning those between levels would have been better I think. Still really enjoyed it overall, and it doesn't overstay its welcome or the minor issues I had may have become more grating. I'd be really interested in seeing what they could do with a sequel to this down the road, though Splashteam is 2/2 for me with very different games so far so I'm not complaining if they do something unique again instead.

Reviewed on Oct 15, 2022


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