Being taken advantage of not with a knife to your throat but with a smile and a wink that will be all too familiar to anyone who has to pay bills, vote in elections or, y’know, pay money for Alien Colonial Marines. It’s a strangely banal kind of dystopia that Pikuniku presents to you and it works all the better for it. The answer is that it’s for both and it’s why it’s an absolute winner.Īt the heart of the game is a journey to defeat a crazed sociopath who’s scamming the island’s population out of its various resources, be that wood, water or corn – apparently the only sustenance available on the island.
And like a good Pixar film, the game will leave you questioning whether it’s for kids or for adults. And while Pikuniku looks like something put together by an Undergraduate who’s drunkedly tossing together their final assignment the night before its deadline, it’s a design that fits together so well with Pikuniku’s gameplay, music, and writing that it all just melds together into a wonderfully weird experience.
But it’s also a game where you can enter a realm of toast, play hide and seek with a rock, and hunt down a golden tooth for a wizard for no other reason than them being a few of the strange little secrets that are dotted around this charmingly simple game. It’s a game that you can complete in a few hours, rolling and kicking your way to saving a bizarre little island. We’re smiling at just the thought of it.TL DR: A weird and wonderful adventure to wow you on a rainy afternoonįamily Focus? Click here for more information And dammit, in the dark of winter that’s a message that JDR can get behind. Pikuniku invites you to spend a few hours in its world, to help others, not because there’s a pot of gold at the end but because it’s a nice thing to do. Like another recent lol-filled game, it pushes a certain brand of millennial comedy but with a brilliant eye for timing and it’s sure to tickle even the most meme-averse player. It helps that Pikuniku is confident in its humour and characters, unafraid to keep the jokes coming thick and fast and it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome with its story or its compact playtime (around 4-5 hours). But it's told with an effortless shrug and then it's back to kicking and somersaulting through the world with joyful abandon. It holds at its core a message of hope, that if we can look past the surface and work together we can make a better world. Pikuniku colourful visuals and jumble of oddball characters belie its more sober message: there’s a simple but effective story of environmental damage in the wake of capitalist greed (even a sly comment on workers’ rights).
Arrows, switches and spikes are about as complicated as it gets. And that’s before you’ve tackled your first mini-boss. There’s plenty to do in the first village alone: crops to save, a rock playing hide-and-seek and a game of ‘backkick’ in need of winning (two hoops and a melon - you can work out the rest). Once you convince the villagers you’re actually a helpful beastie you’re given licence to roam around the world and discover just what exactly is going on with the too-good-to-be-true Sunshine Inc, led by the smiley pink Mr Sunshine and his band of “helpful” robots which are intent on stealing the villagers’ corn in exchange for a few coins. Legend tells of a beast that spreads destruction wherever it goes, slumbering in a cave in the depths of the mountain, rather similar to the one you just woke up from in fact.
#WILL THERE BE A PIKUNIKU 2 FULL#
After being awoken by a friendly ghost - “it’s dangerous to go alone,” they say, “take this: my full moral support” (just one of the humorous nods to games past) - you are thrown out into the world and quickly captured by the local villagers.
Exploring the village is its own reward with plenty of secrets to be found.īut it would be nothing if you didn’t have somewhere to go.
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