Tinykin is Pikimin, but as a puzzle-platformer.

Solid platformer fundamentals, adorable aesthetic, well designed puzzles. Not really challenging, but it’s hard to tell if they were trying to be challenging.

Like Pikmin, the game is all about finding little buddies who follow you around, and can be used to do stuff like “carry stuff” or “blow up” or “be a bridge” or whatever. So it’s a puzzle game where you’re managing resources to solve problems. Don’t have 20 purple dudes to pick up something heavy? Go find more purple dudes. Not tall enough to hit a ledge? Go find more green dudes. And so on.

There’s almost always way more dudes than you need to solve everything in the level.

Also like Pikmin, you’re playing a little dude on an exploration mission to earth, except you’re like 2cm tall and you spend all game running around a house interacting with bugs, solving bug problems, dealing with bug society.

Quick weird note on difficulty: The game has a real strange approach to its primary collection item “pollen”. There’s one pollen goal per map, and it gets you an extension to your hover ability. But you don’t need to get 100% of the pollen in a level to get your bubble upgrade, you just need to get like 80%. Getting to like 95-98% is decently challenging. That last 2%? Absolute madness.

Artifact puzzles are also sorta weird difficulty-wise. Most of them are obvious because they’re typically tied to the obvious “things you can do” in a given map. In the later levels you have to first find which specific bug has a quest for you to go do, and some of these levels are immense and absolutely chock full of bugs. Running around and talking to every damned bug sucks.

It’s fine. I got it through Game Pass so the normal Game Pass Caveats apply.

The only thing that very sadly drops this from a “Highly Recommended” is that the game broke itself mere minutes from finishing it. I was in (what appears to be) the last level. I had done basically everything except turn in the final quest, I was just tooling around doing sidequest cleanup, and I was multitasking. If you’ve got a bunch of purple dudes carrying something cross-map, you don’t have to babysit them. So I was off exploring while they were delivering an aligator toy.

I was midair when they delivered which zoomed the camera over to a cutscene. When it zoomed me back I fell through the floor and the game respawned me out of bounds. Then it respawned me again in a secret zone I hadn’t opened yet. Because I hadn’t opened it yet it was locked from the outside. So I’m just stuck in this damn room, no way to respawn, no way to restart the level, no way to bounce myself back inbounds, no way to go back to the hub world, I’m just screwed.

My options are to quit playing or restart this 4-6 hr game from scratch. I will not be doing that, so I’m writing about it and uninstalling.