Short Shameful Confession: Despite being a hard-line life-long insufferable and unquestioning Nintendo fanboy, I have never directly interacted with a Pikmin game. Never rented. Never booted. Never touched controller. I briefly watched Wife play Pikmin 3. I played Olimar when required in Smash Challenges. That is the sum total of my experience with the series. I think Pikmin just came out at an unfortunate time where all my media consumption was spent watching buildings smolder, and I just . . never picked up anything from the series after that.

But Pikmin 4 has a RESCUE PUP named OATCHI and that changes everything. Immediate preorder. GOTY contender.

Conveniently – as I understand it – Pikmin 4 is effectively a best-of world tour of past Pikmin gameplay features and functionality. Plus it removes stuff I would have been frustrated by, namely hardcore mandatory time limits. Plus you get a dog. And the dog is adorable.

In modern Nintendo fashion Pikmin 4 is incredibly low-risk upfront. There’s no real lose condition, there’s no hard limit of n days of life support, “hard” encounters can be outright skipped, and they implemented automated checkpoints so you can rewind the game at any time if you beefed an encounter with a giant hungry grub or whatever.

So from start to first Credits-Roll it’s breezy. You tool around at your own pace, finding new varieties of Pikmin, exploring the world, finding treasures to expand your range, exploring dungeons, rescuing members of your crew, etc. It’s just a straight up chill game, good vibes 24/7.

From first Credits-Roll to second Credits-Roll it ramps up back to roughly what I understand was the “original” difficulty. At that point you’re largely tasked with replicating Olimar’s final shipwreck adventure where you have a hard limit of 20 days to find all your ship parts, with a limited variety of Pikmin. It also opens up a whole extra zone to explore with new mechanics, new dungeons, and one reasonably hard long capstone dungeon.

Then comes the route to 100%. 100% in Pikmin 4 is doable but man it gets hard. The final pinnacle dungeon is the 10 hardest levels of the game. Crazy tight time limits, every level has limited Pikmin who don’t carry over, and the goals require a level of multi-tasking the game encourages but doesn’t require until that point.

Regardless of your past engagement with the series, regardless of your level of hardcore-ness, Pikmin 4 has something for literally everyone. It’s a new game and it’s a best-of. It’s easier than past games, and also has bits that are just as hard if you feel like engaging with them.

Highly Highly Highly Recommended.