3.5/5 ★ – AvatarAang's review of Tinykin.

Absolutely delightful game. I came in expecting a Pikmin clone, but what I got was more of a 3D collectathon with Pikmin-like elements. The game has zero stakes and is pretty easy, but it has a great gameplay loop that had me hooked across my 7 hour playthrough. Where to start? You have an assortment of five different "Tinykin" to work with, who are somewhat similar to Pikmin. However, only one type actually functions like Pikmin. The others are used to alter the environment, extend your reach, or open new pathways. Similar to the Pikmin series, you are frequently increasing your army of Tinykin. However, in a surprising twist, you cannot bring your Tinykin with you to new areas. This means that nearly all your abilities reset whenever you enter a new area. The only ability you get to keep is your jump distance (which can be increased with collectibles). What I love about this game is how each of the six locations feels like a puzzle to be solved. You are dumped at the bottom of a multi-level playground to explore (each representing a different room of a very cluttered house). However, even though you can see ways to progress, you cannot do so because all of your abilities have reset. Your first job is to look around to find more Tinykin to build up your exploration abilities again. As you wander around, you find other collectibles to collect: nectar (similar to coins in the Mario series), mail, large objects for Tinykin to carry (a la Pikmin), and the occasional citizen who needs help (here, the collectible is the reward). There are also plenty of obstacles that require specific Tinykin to overcome, which you may or may not have. You can use certain Tinykin to open up shortcuts that allow you to zip to other parts of the level, or climb back up if you fall down. You may also need to move obstacles to create a path for Tinykin to carry objects down to the floor, even though you may not have found those objects yet. It's just so satisfying. The gameplay loop I fell into was doing a circular sweep of each room. So for example, in one level I first looked all around the floor, grabbing Tinykin and nectar and making mental notes of areas I would need to return to. Then I would pick one of the furniture and scale it as high as I could, grabbing everything I could find along the way. At the top, you usually get a shortcut to another area, so I'd zoom over there and start scaling another structure in the room. Until, in the end, I had been everywhere and found everything the level had to offer! It's such a good flow. Something I really appreciated is that you can do the whole level without hardly any dialogue. Every level has an objective for you to complete and the game kind of expects you to talk to people, but if you just go everywhere and do everything you can complete the objective without even knowing what it is! (it usually requires Tinykin to bring something somewhere, which they do automatically once you throw enough at the object for it to be carried) This is a positive because, unfortunately, the dialogue is kind of bad in this game. It's not upsetting or incoherent or anything. However, it is VERY generic. Nearly every NPC in the game has something to say, and nearly all of it is humor that doesn't really land. One level, the kitchen, has some fairly engaging commentary on the rich vs. the poor, but otherwise you're gonna want to just skip all the chatter and just play the game. And you know, I'm grateful that I can do that because there are PLENTY of games that pad things out with dialogue instead of trusting the player to figure things out on their own. The levels steadily get more complex and intricate the further you get into the game. And the music is surprisingly good. From probably the second area onwards, every level's music is excellent. My favorite was the kitchen! It's one of those levels that will stick with you long after playing the game. Kind of like A Hat in Time's windmill, or Psychonauts 2's game show level. I was totally engrossed! The overall story of the game is serviceable, but towards the end some very interesting questions were raised that never got answered. That isn't necessarily a con--sometimes you like a good unsolved mystery. But it was unclear whether that was the intent or if I actually missed something. I found the post-game to be a little weak. There are some time trials you can do for costumes, but I did not like the costumes so I wound up only doing a couple. Revisiting levels isn't as fun because you pick up with all the Tinykin you had when you last visited that specific level, so if you did the whole thing in one run then you don't get the same satisfaction of unraveling the level that you got the first time. One thing that I wished the game had was a nectar detector. I easily found enough to get the jump upgrade in every level. However, I always wound up missing 10-20 of the total number of nectar in each level, and there is no way to search for them. I had to give up. Overall, this was a delightful surprise and a pretty solid experience! A very high 7/10 for me, possibly a low 8. I would recommend this to Pikmin fans, but really at its heart it is most easily recommended to fans of puzzle platformers!