Pikuniku Will Slap You With Some Silly – Review (PC)

By Dave Lambden Last updated Jan 19, 2019

It’s January. The time of year when those in the northern hemisphere experience the most amount of gloom and least amount of sunshine. We gamers have spent the last six months playing sad, depressing, and serious games like God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s time for a pick me up – something light hearted, simple and silly. Pikuniku arrives just in time for the PC and Nintendo Switch. This cheery puzzle/platformer from a team of four developers at Sectordub Studio is out January 24th and is sure to have you smiling start to finish.

Gameplay

At its core, Pikuniku is a puzzle-platformer. It uses a very simple set of controls and mechanics to move around the world and get past obstacles. Players will manipulate objects such as rocks, barrels, and acorns to interact with switches, levers, and elevators. Puzzle solving is limited to pushing objects around and using a kick move to hit switches and levelers. At times it was difficult to judge how fast and quickly items would move and made some points in the game feel less challenging and more tedious. You’ll also warp through tubes and pass through hidden holes in walls to access concealed and secret areas. There are also stealthy sections where you have to move through vents to avoid enemies. Players will stumble upon or be gifted hats that grant new abilities as they progress. A watering can hat allows you to water small flowers so they can grow into platforms, allowing the player to access new areas. A pencil hat is used to help an artist draw a picture of a scary face that will be used on a scare crow in a field of corn.

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Offense is limited to boss battles where you’ll use your jump and kick moves to attack. In some cases you’ll also interact with special items such as exploding acorns to defeat robotic foes. None of what I’ve just mentioned is at all challenging in Pikuniku, nor are there any fresh gameplay mechanics. I died on a couple of occasions due only to poorly timed jumps, or a deadly set of spikes. All of this can be played in co-op as well, adding a bit of teamwork, or mayhem to your play through.

As a basic puzzle/platformer, Pikuniku is nothing special. It’s heavily influenced by the 2D side scrolling classics of the SNES era and, looking at just the base gameplay, it does nothing new. Where Pikuniku sets itself apart is in the variety it presents. The developers have taken the core mechanics and pasted them onto so many weird, wacky and random scenarios, you can’t help but find enjoyment. In the first twenty minutes of playing the game, I kicked a snarky spider, played hide and seek with a lonely rock, sought out apples to power up a mysterious shrine, and repaired a bridge as a debt to a village of helpless corn farmers. The variety carries on throughout the game as these WarioWare style events play out with new characters you meet along your journey. I smiled the whole time, and literally laughed out loud on multiple occasions.

Story

While complimented by its outlandish and slapdash gameplay, the silly personality of this game really is a product of its story and characters. Initially Pikuniku comes off as a children’s game with its light-hearted story telling and endearing characters. But just like any good Pixar movie, there are mature undertones and jokes that kids will completely miss but adults can appreciate.

The game begins with your character (which is effectively a red jelly bean with legs) awakening in a deep dark cave. An ominous ghost is there to greet you as you awake and gives you little direction – except to find a way out of the cavern. Shortly after finding daylight, you stumble on the aforementioned village of corn farmers. The townsfolk have been brought up on a bedtime tale of a terrible beast slumbering in the cave, and seem to think that your character is that beast. In order the prove to them that you are not a threat, you help them repair a bridge (you are the one who destroyed the bridge – but in fairness, its construction was poor at best). Soon after you uncover a communistic conspiracy where citizens of different villages are being brainwashed by an evil ruler masquerading as a philanthropist.

As mentioned before, the duality of the subject matter is impressive. It’s enough to make both a child and adult giggle for completely different reasons. Kids will find enjoyment in kicking around unsuspecting and helpless NPCs to their heart’s content, and adults will find amusement at how much the main antagonist reminds them of Kim Jong-Un.

Graphics

Pikuniku has a widely varied set of backdrops to show off a vibrant pastel-based color palette. Moving from a small farming village, to a forest canopy, to a hidden bunker in an abandoned metro station, Pikuniku refuses to bore with is visual style as you’ll never stay in one setting for too long. The art style quickly took me back to my childhood, and specifically reminded me of the Mr. Men series of books by Roger Hargreaves.

Animation is particularity smooth, flowing, and dynamic. Everything in the game, and specifically character movement, has a bouncy elasticity to it. There were times when it looked like my character had no two animations that were the same. Every bounce, flail and kick looked as though it were happening in real time and stringently obeying the real world laws of physics.

Pikuniku often had me asking “where did they come up with this?”. And that is always a good sign in a creative space. This game will not challenge you nor will it show you anything that you haven’t seen before from a mechanic point of view. Clocking in at only 3 to 5 hours, you won’t even be playing it for all that long. But what Pikuniku will do is make you smile. It’s outrageous, random, nostalgic, and most importantly, shouldn’t be missed.