You’re not always told where to go and many of the objectives encourage you to explore or find the purpose of an item by yourself. The only rewards you can look forward to are hats, collectible trophies and exchanges with other characters, but even those only offer fleeting chuckles. Pikuniku’s challenge never steps into difficult territory and, alongside the lack of options in terms of ways to complete quests, makes for some rather uninteresting gameplay. It might have trivialized things a bit, but I felt let down that I couldn’t engage in a wobbly kicking match with the bouncer in order to get in. The only way I would get in was by purchasing a pair of sunglasses from the nearby shop.
There, I bumped into its robotic bouncer which, after scanning me, concluded that my lovely flower hat –Piku can obtain and wear several– wasn’t stylish enough. There’s only ever one solution to the requests of its unusual denizens and, in spite of its relatively short length, their simplicity only detracts from the overall experience.īeing tasked with entering the Sunshine Club, I confidently waltzed up to the entrance. Pikuniku also doesn’t allow for much creativity in approaching its objectives. You can only vaguely guess the ball’s trajectory, while many of your kicks will hit your opponent and yet, random and unhinged as it is, it feels so right that I found myself wishing more bits were like it. Kicking a ball around is one of the most unreliable and imprecise things you’re asked to do, but it’s when Pikuniku embraces this floatiness that it shines the most. You have to improvise when there’s a shortage of hands in your world, I guess. Whether it’s a small stretch of Mario-esque platforming where wrongly timing a jump sends you back to generously placed checkpoints, running away from a giant robot while jumping over and rolling through obstacles or arranging wires to reroute power, you’re dealing with overly familiar gameplay that has been better executed elsewhere.Ī few exceptions do make it in, though, like the Baskick championship, which pits Piku against a local in a match of what’s essentially basketball but played with their feet. This ultimately has no lasting effect on the game world, but I found myself more engaged by fooling around, or just trying to wrestle with the game’s physics while kicking a ball up a slope, than I did tackling the puzzles and platforming required to progress.Īs a platformer, Pikuniku doesn’t lean enough into its crazy, floaty side, focusing on rather bland sequences and mini-games instead. Do it long enough and they’ll start erratically thrashing their own legs about, in an attempt to get you to stop. As soon as you exit the cave in which you wake up, you’ll notice a distinct lack of arms in Pikuniku’s 2D world, which limits your means of engaging with others to speaking or kicking them in the face.Īs humorous as the dialogue sometimes gets, there’s something very satisfying to kicking colorful blobs and watching them helplessly fly through the air for a few seconds.
Your first steps as Piku, the red, round protagonist, see you getting used to its few abilities: moving, jumping, rolling and kicking. Yes, this is Devolver Digital-published, why do you ask? It also starts with a pink creature in a top hat enthusiastically offering “free money” in exchange for junk. Pikuniku is the type of game in which one moment you’re rescuing vegetable-shaped blobs stuck on trees, while another sees you invading the realm of a giant demonic piece of toast, in a sequence that pays tribute to classic platformers.
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