Go! Go! GOTY! 2022: Tinykin

• Game: Splashteam's Tinykin.
• Release Month: August.
• Quick Look: Here (Dan / Grubb).
• Started: 07/12.
• Completed: 08/12.

It's remarkable that in the 21 years since Pikmin was released on GameCube, it has only ever seen a handful of imitators and has only been bettered just once (its immediate sequel, Pikmin 2). There are certainly games that existed prior and since that have you herding large crowds of units to complete goals, but those belong to the already well-established RTS genre and tend to have different priorities in mind (not to mention generally less cute art styles). The only Pikmin clones I'd personally ever encountered before this year were Triumph's Overlord series and a PS2 budget game called The Adventures of Darwin (originally Simple 2000 Series Vol. 99: The Genshijin, if you're familiar with that whole B-game enterprise), but here comes Tinykin to not only attempt a particular game format that has confounded so many but to do so with the level of craft and ambition that would make it a genuine contender for Pikmin's throne. Color me very surprised that a small Indie studio pulled this off, even one with some prior experience in quality platforming (Splashteam also made the masocore-ish puzzle-platformer Splasher, released back in 2017).

In Tinykin the player is the human space explorer Milodane who has been tracking the location of humanity's original homeworld and has recieved an encouraging signal being broadcast from a distant system. Upon teleporting there from orbit, however, he finds himself trapped in what appears to be an enormous approximation of a 20th-century Earth house filled with mostly friendly, sapient bugs. In addition to NPCs based on ants, dung beetles, dragonflies, and other insects there are the Tinykin: smaller beings that generally keep to themselves but are drawn to Milodane and seem willing to obey his orders. The player encounters new Tinykin as they play, each one providing different roles: the initial Pinks are the workhorses that carry items around, for example. As the game does not have combat of any kind, most of the other Tinykin types tend to lend their assistance to the platforming in some way: making bridges across wide gaps, for example, or operating as makeshift ladders to help you reach higher locations. Each room of the house is its own "world" filled with objectives, including the main scavenger hunt for parts of a spaceship to use to get back home. Others include collecting chunks of pollen—the stages are absolutely filled with these, usually over a thousand per room, and hitting milestones extends the amount of time you can float through the air—completing side-quests for museum exhibits that offer tidbits of lore about the setting, and the Tinykin themselves which can be hatched from their eggs or rescued from captivity. It is absolutely a collectathon-style 3D platformer, with the Pikmin aspects largely secondary to your chief goals of exploration and finding stuff. However, having a system where your little friends cannot die (except for the explosive Reds, who seem entirely OK with their violent ends) feels almost truer to the cute and chill vibes of Nintendo's original series. (I'm guessing someone working on this game hated those little, sad Pikmin death noises as much as I did.)

Yet a game like this wouldn't work without some fantastic 3D level design, which is a hard ask for any studio let alone a smaller Indie one, and Tinykin absolutely nails it. Every level is full of secrets and shortcut ropes to drop and little side-areas that might contain side-quest items or just a clump of pollen, and you quickly get into the habit of regularly checking around every corner and under every rock. Each room has a societal purpose behind it and a reason for the bugs to settle there, giving each one a personality beyond its original utility as a living space for what would be a colossal-sized human: the living room has been turned into a religious center, the kitchen is where food is grown, the bathroom is where the shy dung beetles and hard-partying silverfish try to co-exist since few else tolerate them, and so on. Certain NPCs tend to follow you from one room to the next to lend you their dubious wisdom and there's always plenty of pretty funny dialogue to listen in on as you explore each new area. The game has its share of narrative mysteries too, giving it a stronger bedrock of storytelling than most games of its type: the bugs' long-absent deity, and original owner of the house, is a human named Ardwin that used to converse with these intelligent bugs at some point in the distant past and granted them his knowledge before vanishing. Signs he still exists somewhere become evident the more you play and it becomes a curiosity that motivates you into digging a little deeper. One aspect about the storytelling that I found odd though was how your protagonist was introduced as a genius explorer and scientist, yet his interiority completely vanishes once the game begins and he mostly exists as a mute cipher from then on: I'd have loved to hear more of his thoughts after each discovery, in a similar manner to the way Captain Olimar took regular notes about the flora and fauna and items of value he found while exploring.

Credit too goes to the game's solid presentation. The NPCs and protagonist are all 2D presumably to save on animation costs—it'd be a lot to animate that many Tinykin along with everything else—but the worlds themselves are rendered in some very sharp 3D graphics that give you a solid idea of what everything is: given the whole game is in a massively upscaled suburban home every platform and object is necessarily some piece of furniture or a household good, either left as-is or has been repurposed by the bugs as bridges or steps or some other means of getting around. The music is also fantastic: not only does every room have its own catchy orchestral theme that nails the feeling of discovery and adventure, but each has multiple variations depending on your immediate surroundings. A quieter area underneath a couch, for instance, might have a slightly more subdued version of that level's theme playing, or it might start picking up with heavier guitar and percussion elements once you get closer to a stereo system. I don't think I was ever not impressed with the size and scope of the game and the confidence with which it carries itself in a relatively modern genre most Indies have found trouble replicating. While Pikmin is of course the first game that comes to mind given the horde of little minions, I'd probably liken Tinykin to (slightly) more obscure Nintendo paragons Chibi-Robo or Little King's Story: delightful and narratively fascinating games that balance platforming/action and adventure game elements with a witty script and some eccentric story ideas bolstering an already sufficiently compelling gameplay loop. It's absolutely one of my favorites so far this year.

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tinykin
3. Tunic
4. Signalis
5. HoloCure

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