Must know
What is it? A 3D platformer with Pikmin-esque flavor.
Expect to pay: $25/£19.50
Publication date: Out now
Developer: splash team
Publisher: tinyBuild
Judged by: Intel i7 8700K, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
Multiplayer? no
Clutch: Official site (opens in new tab)
Let me get the disappointment out of the way first. In Tinykin, you play a tiny interstellar traveler who commands a legion of microscopic minions to navigate an oversized environment, and yet it’s not the PC-compatible Pikmin I was hoping for. Take a deep breath with me. As we do our mourning now, we can appreciate Tinykin for what it is: a delightful, laid-back platformer meandering through a world lovingly rendered from a bug’s-eye view.
You play as Milodane, a researcher from a distant planet so far in the future that the human population can no longer remember where they came from. When Milo activates an experimental transporter to pursue his hypothesis about humanity’s interstellar origin, his teleportation technology not only strands him on another world, but reduces it to miniature scale. Milo awakens in the House, an abandoned 1990s house populated by an insect society that remembers the house’s original owner as an absent deity, and the Tinykin, a race of enigmatic gremlins who respond uniquely to Milo’s commands. As Milo, your goal is simple: use your Tinykin, collect six components from the House’s insect societies, and reassemble a machine to teleport home.
Tinykin’s inspirations are apparent from the first moment a dozen of your color-coded comrades are put in place with a familiar whistle, marching to their own synchronized “hut-hut-hut” growl as they lift an oversized object. But mechanically, the similarities are short-lived. Where Pikmin is a remixed RTS, Tinykin is a 3D platformer more in line with something like Banjo-Kazooie, with an even more laid-back vibe.
Yes, you throw Tinykin by the dozen to solve all your problems. But there is no real decision making involved, as there is no way to misuse them. A finite number is required in each area. You can’t waste them or endanger them or accidentally drown an entire crew and feel bad about yourself for a week. In Tinykin, the Tinykin are surprisingly unimportant.
At first I was surprised at how little thought they demanded: the only logic involved is whether you currently have enough Tinykin to tackle the obstacle directly in front of you. If so, just throw the required amount of Tinykin bomb until the thing explodes. If not, just run around and pop a handful of purple eggs until you can carry that corn on the cob. Where Pikmin makes you think about when, where and how to deploy your powers, Tinykin only expects you to passively collect them as you travel.
Reading this I would expect this to bother me. But thankfully Milo feels great enough to move that I eventually became happy with the place my Tinykin occupied: facilitating my movement around the house, rather than my only way of coping. While Milo’s motion toolkit isn’t very deep, it feels excellent to control. He has a temporary bubble glider to float over holes. Instead of a sprint button, you get instant access to a “soapboard” to skate and grind across the solid surfaces of the house – and crucially, it has an endlessly spamable kickflip button.
Whether you’re platforming or swinging Tinykin, Milo’s actions are all snappy and responsive. Jumping, running and deploying its bubble glider are all blessedly free of the kind of mess that is all too common with platforms elsewhere. I didn’t trip over inexplicable geometry collisions, no missed jumps I was convinced I would make. Movement in Tinykin feels clean and satisfying, without any frustration at making moving through its jumbo shrunken world anything less than a pleasure.
And that’s great, because the house is Tinykin’s real star, more than the titular creatures themselves. The rooms are home to different sections of the insect society, each forming a self-contained level with its own theme and atmosphere. In the burrow, reverent shield bugs have built a cardboard cathedral. The bathroom has since been converted into an eternal nightclub with silverfish. Tinykin’s environmental artists get incredible miles from the simple pleasure of seeing large household objects rearranged in insect-scale architecture and geography. And there is no spider to be seen. Arachnophobes rejoice.
From the fields strewn across the green-backed sponges of the farmland on the kitchen floor, to the pushpin furniture in the food-tin condominiums, Tinykin is brimming with beautiful visual details. For me, these were the main rewards for navigating every nook and cranny. That’s good, because honestly, none of the real collectibles you collect as you move through Tinykin’s rooms were very strong motivators.
Clumps of pollen pollute the landscape of the house, making your bubble glider last longer if you collect enough in a given room. But reaching that threshold was a bit automatic, accomplished easily enough by scattering nearby bushes as I amassed my obligatory Tinykin horde in each area. Meanwhile, collectibles didn’t excite, because the core mystery surrounding the House and how it relates to Milo’s research was one I could easily explain. Despite that, there was still excitement when I caught a glimpse of an egg in the distance or a glimpse of pollen – not for the collectible itself, but for what I would see along the way.
The fiction of this small world made me invest even less in my Tinykin than the mechanics — in dozens of interactions with bug NPCs, maybe 10 ever had something to say about them or my uncanny ability to direct them. Neither she nor Milo had enough charisma to feel an integral part of the experience, which left me wondering why, instead of being a vaguely Harry Potter-esque space dwarf, I wasn’t a cool ladybug or something. A cool ladybug with endless kickflips. The writing generally does not yield many hits. When the stratified insect society isn’t clumsy with intro-level political theory, it’s a vehicle for cookie-cutters’ referential humor. I am sorry to report that in 2022 we are apparently still making “the pie is a lie” joke.
But even after turning me into a space bum, Tinykin delivers the inherent childish joy of scrambling over a little thing that suddenly becomes very big. That was clearly the goal, and Tinykin does not exceed his ambitions. It’s a happy, laid-back six-or-so hour of platforming in a lively little world. Nothing more nothing less.
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