Tinykin (2022)

I loved this game so much. Not often do I "no-life" games anymore, but I couldn't stop playing Tinykin due to the sheer comfort in the moment to moment gameplay. The worlds are lush and filled out, no exploration goes unrewarded, and the movement couldn't possibly be more fluid. Once you get used to the controls (which doesn't take long at all, by the way) you can blast through the map at break-neck speed, and the gameplay loop is highly addictive.

My only complaint is I wish it was 10-15x longer lol, it was just that fun. Finished it 100% in about 6 hours, but my gameplay style usually falls somewhere between "rushing" and "speedrunning". I can't recommend this game enough!

While it feels great to skate around and there's a great pace to the platforming as you noodle through the levels and piece back together your environment of shortcuts, all dialogue varies between sickly and annoying. It also just feels like there's too much stuff in a level. I spent nearly an hour on the first "real" level 100%ing it just on my way to completing the real objective, and by the end of it I was so done with the level I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

It's certainly pretty cute but I think it could have appreciated a bit of modesty with what it was trying to do, both in terms of letting me get out of there a bit faster and also just cutting back severely on your characters and writing if it wasn't going to be good.

Took a good 5 hours to get every artifact, every bubble, and most of the pollen.

My thoughts since the demo still remain(except I experienced no microstuttering this time). This is a really fun low stakes Pikmin 3D platformer. Every level is brimming with details and the Tinykin compliment the level design and the many approaches to it. Using the stacking Tinykin to gain enough height to shimmy around or glide high up above and then land into a zipline

If there is one thing I especially don't like, however. It's the pollen. They act as the gems of Sypro or the notes in Banjo-Kazooie. Getting a ton of pollen is a good incentive to get more bubbles to glide more, but since the maps in Tinykin are enormous in scale, finding the last pollen is one of the most annoying needle in a haystack situations I have had in a long time. A solution would be like in Spyro the Dragon: Year of the Dragon or the Reignited Trilogy where if you press an input, Sparx will point to one of the gems that you haven't collected yet. I want to see the last of the missing pollen with the AR instead of rummaging through every room again.