Category: Video Games

Knuckle Sandwich

Ed Note: This writeup was written prior to the release of the 1.2.6 version of Knuckle Sandwich. The 1.2.6 update added an extra item slot, balanced party members, “Added level increase to late-game party members during regular difficulty runs,” and major buffs to every single held item. In short, it makes some changes to a large number of the things I complained about. I don’t think it’s enough to fix the game, but I find it both worth noting, and somewhat vindicating.

I don’t recommend Knuckle Sandwich for reasons that are hard to summarize. In short, the game fails to live up to its spiritual predecessors in either mechanics or narrative, while making a variety of design decisions I disagree with, and that make it frustrating to play.

Genre-wise, Knuckle Sandwich is technically an RPG. It meets virtually every part of the general definition we have for those games, so it’s unfortunate that I think the term is actually useless here. I think a more accurate descriptor would be “weird RPG,” which is to say something very much in the vein of Earthbound, Undertale, or No Delivery.

The main reason I simply cannot recommend Knuckle Sandwich is that Undertale exists. I think there’s a strong argument that Undertale does literally everything except (some parts of) combat better than Knuckle Sandwich.

I also can’t really recommend Knuckle Sandwich to people who loved Undertale, because the game is just universally worse. I don’t like having to say that. Knuckle Sandwich isn’t phoned in, or low effort. It’s just not as good as the games that have inspired it.

Here’s why.

Combat

Combat is the heart of Knuckle Sandwich’s mechanics. There is some exploration. There are some puzzles. But in both cases, they are fairly minor. The vast majority of this game is its combat.

While Knuckle Sandwich starts with the traditional RPG blueprint (a basic attack, a mana system (EP) for special attacks, HP bars, etc.) it quickly makes changes to the system. All attacks, from both the player and enemies, involve playing a WarioWare style mini-game of some sort.

I’m going to go into lots of detail, mostly in order to justify the level vitriol I’m going to be leveling against someone’s long term passion project.

Let’s start with the player basic attack.

There are three basic attack mini-games. This brings up the first problem: which one you get is random. Which would be fine if they were equivalent in terms of damage. But that was not my experience.

They’re also just kind of frustrating to play, with some taking much longer than others. They take a long time to start up. You can skip the wait by pressing a button, but that same button is used for the damage input. So if you get impatient, try to skip, and accidentally double tap, you miss a turn.

Next up, the player’s special attacks. After 10 hours, and at max level, I had 4 special attacks. I was given one to start, got two from leveling up, and had a fourth from an equipped item.

This is an INCREDIBLY small amount of options, and many of the attacks are just bad. A 4 turn 1 point defense buff is awful, and I barely ever used it.

Finally, there’s also a defense command that regenerates a single point of mana and ups defense. But because of how enemy attacks work, it almost always felt like a mistake to use this.

Since some special attacks are granted by equipment, let’s talk about items real quick. Characters have 3 slots: a left hand, a right hand and an accessory. I only saw about 3 weapons total throughout the entire game. Two were knives and one was a pair of scissors. There were also several pairs of gloves that boosted defense, but since they took up both the left and right hand slot, they didn’t feel worth using. The strategic options are again, incredibly limited.

More annoyingly, equipped items take up inventory slots. This would be tolerable except each character can only carry eight items. This means if a character has three items equipped, they can only carry five other items.

This isn’t helped by the fact that key items have to go into your inventory. So if you find a key needed to open a door, you either have to toss items out, or backtrack to an item storage PC.

There are lots of design decisions in games that are subjective and up for debate. The item limit in Knuckle Sandwich is not one of them. It’s a bad system. It punishes equipping items, it punishes exploring for extra items that the you can’t carry, and it punishes carrying quest or bonus items with you in case they have a fun interaction or might be useful later. I hate it.

Before we fully dive into the rest of Knuckle Sandwich’s combat, I want to talk about how the game interfaces with with some other standard RPG mechanics. These are: party members, stats, and leveling.

In combat, you can use the player character, plus up to one other character. There are 3 primary party members, and a few more that join at various points. But for a vast majority of the game, you only have a maximum of one other party member available.

And for the brief portion of time while you have access to all of them, there’s no reason to use any party member but the highest level one. Experience points are not shared across the party. As such, one member will always be significantly higher leveled than the others.

It’s a really questionable structure. Combined with the fact that it’s hard to tell what stats even do, it makes me wonder why the game even has levels. In addition, enemies don’t respawn, so grinding levels isn’t even an option if for some reason you did love a specific character.

So let’s talk about better parts of Knuckle Sandwich: the rest of the combat. There are two types of enemy attacks: standard attacks, where you can press a button to avoid all the damage, and the mini-games. For the standard attacks, enemies will perform some sort of mini-animation with a tell. Press a button right after the tell, and you’ll dodge the attack.

The individual mini-games are generally more fun, and are fairly varied. Some are shmups, there’s an infinite runner, and several are Wario-Ware like quick reflexes.

Some are less fun, like the one that asks you to do math very quickly.

But while I did call this the good part, that’s not entirely accurate either. Because while the individual mini-games are fun, they’re not hugely fun to play over and over and over. And combat really drags on.

And I have a problem with the bosses as well. To keep this brief, here’s a summary: Knuckle Sandwich has many boss fights where you don’t progress by “winning.” Instead, you defeat them by tiring them out, or just engaging with a separate system. As a player, since I didn’t know which fight was which, I ended up wasting resources and effort on fights where I didn’t need to, and that feels bad.

At it’s heart, the problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s combat system is that it just doesn’t have much strategic space. Many of the RPG mechanics feel ancillary to the real time mechanics, and the real time mechanics are a mixed bag that quickly becomes repetitive.

But now let’s talk about the story.

Story

From here on out, there will be spoilers for every part of Knuckle Sandwich. You have been warned.

My primary problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s story is that it feels unconnected. It hits all the story beats of the weird RPG. A weird world, bizarre characters, strange non-logic, and friends. But many of these don’t feel earned, or even internally consistent.

I’m not a writer, so I can’t break down exactly why the story didn’t work for me. Instead I’m going to give three or so examples.

Let’s start with cannibalism.

Early in the game, you’re attacked by a character while taking out the trash at your job. You kill the attacker while defending yourself. Then you have to chop up this person you murdered and serve them as burgers. Your boss gives a whole speech, and a bit about how you’re now in this together. This seems to be setting up for a sort of Barber of Seville situation, where the player is going to have to murder people who won’t be missed, and cook them.

Except none of that happens and the game seems to immediately forget about this plot thread until the literal Final Boss. Yes, those letters are capitalized on purpose. In retrospect, there are hints at what is going on, but the whole thing is mostly just… never mentioned.

Instead, you meet the other party members, and the characters that the game seems to suggest are your friends. But for some reason they don’t really feel like your friends. The biggest one for me is that your character is mostly just dragged in wake of these “friends” instead of actually joining them.

There’s also a big mechanical reason why they don’t feel like your friends. The “friend” characters don’t actually join the party until later in the game. At that’s where the RPG design really gets in the way encouraging you to only use one of them. While they’re all given their own sub-sections of the narrative where you work with them, those sub-sections don’t focus on those characters as people.

This matters because when Knuckle Sandwich later tries to pull a big emotional event, it lands flat. It’s sorta sad, but I wasn’t attached enough to these characters for it mean much. Likewise, when the game tries to do the “kill god with the power of friendship,” that moment fails equally.

None of Knuckle Sandwich’s supporting cast were given enough time for me to become really attached to them. I don’t dislike them as characters at all. But I feel about them the way I feel about my neighbors. Perfectly nice people. If they asked for help, say shoveling snow or jumpstarting a car, I’d be on it. But there’s no real emotional connection outside of a polite mutual ignorance.

All that out of the way, let’s talk about the biggest plot point of Knuckle Sandwich. You only get to know about it because it’s explained in a monologue in the game’s ending sequence. The whole game is…. actually, I don’t need to say what it is. Because it doesn’t matter!

The big reveal is barely relevant to the entire rest of the game. It isn’t really mechanically present, it isn’t brought up until after it’s been dealt with off-screen by an NPC. And then the game just kind of ends. You, the player, effectively never have to deal with it, outside of one very short semi-postgame sequence.

The vibe I get from Knuckle Sandwich is that the game was made in sections, instead of as a whole piece, and also made under a weird deadline. There are large sections of the game that feel sprawling and unconnected, and others that feel rushed and compressed. If you told me that Knuckle Sandwich as it currently stands is about 30-40% of the game that the creator had in mind, I’d believe you.

But the end result is failure to deliver on both the weirdness of the world and the attempted emotional story beats. Instead, it feels like a set of strung-together vignettes or dream sequences.

Art

This is going to be the one part of this writeup that isn’t me just trashing 5 years of someone else’s work. While I have no strong feelings on the game’s music, I do really like the art. I really don’t enjoy the glitched sections, but I think the animations and art style for almost every other part are great.

The art also feels high effort. For example, the weapon equip system is a bit nuts (in a good way). The game seems to have sprites for each character carrying each item. Personally I’m very curious as to how it all works behind the scenes.

But there’s something else I want to talk about. There’s a single thing about Knuckle Sandwich that I really love. And that is a very specific tone that the game manages to evoke. I don’t know if it’s even intentional, but I love it nonetheless. The primary character of Knuckle Sandwich spends the game with a bruised face, and bags under their eyes, and in my playthrough used knives and scissors as weapons.

The end result is a character who looks utterly defeated, and yet chooses time and time again to square up against cult members, robots, mecha suits, and alien gods. They get up, and they keep moving forward. There’s a distinct tone of simply not caring anymore that I find incredibly unique. I can’t think of another game that made me feel like this.

It’s doesn’t redeem of the rest of the game, but it is memorable.

Conclusion

Knuckle Sandwich is made with heart, and I wish I could recommend it. But the game simply isn’t fun to play. Its strategic elements are light to non-existent. Its real time tactical elements are enough of a mixed bag that they can’t make up for the lack of strategy. The story, while not a mess, feels poorly paced, and manages its plot points badly. The music is fine, and the art is well-made, but those things don’t make the rest of the game fun.

On the flip side, at least Knuckle Sandwich was made by someone who appears to give a shit. I don’t know that I’d purchase another Andy Brophy game on day one, but I’d at least look at it. Knuckle Sandwich might not be worth playing, but it’s not something that should be ignored. And if somehow this post has convinced you that Knuckle Sandwich is what you need, you can find it here.

Ed Note 2: Images are from the Steam Page, and Knuckle Sandwich press kit. I played this on my Steam Deck, and didn’t take screenshots. Frankly, I’m not replaying just to get screenshots.

The Backlog Cleanout

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, and what better time for a bit of cleaning? Specifically, cleaning out the backlog of all the games I played, didn’t write about, and now too much time has elapsed for me to give a fresh review. For each of these games, I’ll be giving my general impressions, and talking a little bit about why I didn’t actually get around to doing a full writeup. I’ll also go in semi-chronological order, so let’s get to it, starting with one of this years indie darlings:

Pizza Tower is a side scrolling platformer that I think is supposed to be in the vein of the old Warioland platformers. I say “I think” because I’ve never played one of those games. My lack of familiarity with the genre is what prevented me from doing a writeup of any sort.

See, I usually like to talk about games in the context of other games, their inspirations, and what they do better than their predecessors. But everything about Pizza Tower is incredibly alien to me. It has an art style that I think is supposed evoke Courage the Cowardly Dog. It has an extremely fast pace, and is very focused on speed and collectable items for points. It was a really difference experience from other games I’ve played.

And frankly, given that the game has an overwhelmingly positive rating with 44,000 reviews right now, I’m not sure I have much to add. I thought Pizza Tower was weird, but good. It also has my favorite game soundtrack of the year, because it just goes wayyyy harder than it has to.

I’m honestly surprised that I never got around to writing about Inkbound. It was one of my games to watch from February last year. And then I bought it, and played 40 hours, and never did a writeup.

Inkbound is a lot of things. It’s a roguelike. It has good multiplayer. It’s an isometric turn-based battler. And it’s really fun. So why didn’t I do a writeup?

Part of that is that I’m conflicted on how I feel about Inkbound’s structure. My internal conflict isn’t helped by the fact that the game itself is in a state a flux. If I’d written a full review earlier, I would probably have complained about the game’s microtransaction store, which has now been completely removed. I would have also probably praised the game’s dual movement/action resource system, where both moving around and performing attacks pulls from a single resource pool. That system has also been replaced.

I may do a writeup on the game in the future. I love the game for its mechanics, and I’m mildly frustrated by it for other reasons. But there’s been so much more added, and so many changes since I logged my 40 hours. At this point even if I sat down today and wrote something, it wouldn’t be indicative of the game’s current state.

Before I say anything about APICO, I think it’s worth noting that I paid approximately $9 for it and bunch of other games on an itch bundle, and not the $20 it currently costs.

APICO is another multiplayer game that I mostly played with friends, and as such, there were quite a few systems I never actually engaged with. It’s trying to be a comfy pixel world game where you breed bees, and gather honey. I think it’s supposed to feel small and cozy.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d like to respond to that design goal with the following screenshot:

Not pictured: my other friends running around desperately trying to keep our system functioning.

Instead of the comfy sim, APICO turned into something closer to Satisfactory. We attempted to hyper optimize production and throughput, which is why I had 12 interactable item windows open at once. As you might expect, it did end up feeling rather grindy.

I don’t really like or dislike APICO a huge amount. It was amusing to play with folks, but some of that was the chaotic dichotomy between the game’s cute pixel art, and our frenzied thrashing to keep our honey cola soft drink production up.

I probably would have gotten around to doing a writeup on PlateUp if I’d played more than 4 hours of it. It’s a multiplayer food production game in the vein of Overcooked. But it trades specific levels out for a roguelike set of upgrades and runs.

That said, I only played 4 hours of it because that’s how long it took for there to be a conflict between my friends, and then we never returned it to it. And I have no desire to play a game like PlateUp by myself.

End result? I dropped it much earlier than I would have otherwise, and I’m also now realizing it might have been a waste of $20. Oh well.

Dragon Castle was one of three games with “dragon” in the name that I played in a one week span, the other two being Tiger and Dragon, which I loved, and Dragonwood, which I hated. Being the awkward middle child of the trio, compounded with the fact that I only played it once, meant that I never really got around to talking about Dragon Castle.

It’s a perfectly functional sort of tile drafting/placement/set collection game. I enjoyed it. But I didn’t play it enough, and it didn’t leave a strong enough impression for me to really be like “Oh, I love this, I must speak about it more.”

But hey, you know what game did leave a strong impression? Aegean Sea. It was first game I’ve ever played where 3 turns in, everyone at the table decided that they would rather play something else, and unanimously sort of just rage quit.

Rage quitting a board game might not sound like much coming from me, the poster child for ADHD medication. That said, I was playing with a professional game designer with multiple published games, and someone who just tracks how many victory points everyone else at the table has in games like Feast for Odin. In their head.

Goodbye Aegean Sea. You will not be missed. (Which is weird because I like other Carl Chudyk designs)

I’ve described Farlight 84 as Wish.com Fortnite. It’s a battle royale shooter, and outside of the cool vehicles, it doesn’t have a single piece of personality.

If AI ever does get around to generating games, this is the sort of thing that it will make. A generic mobile shooter stuffed with microtransactions and lootboxes. Characters that feel like they were designed by combining a list of demographics and fetishes, and making sure there was something for everyone.

Farlight 84 is polished gravel. Functional, technically effective, and displaying all the heart of the Grinch at the start of the book.

So I’d like to admit something. I couldn’t stand Mario Bros Wonder. I don’t understand how this game was even in consideration for game of the year.

Here’s the thing: I’m usually not in the position of not liking a game everyone else loves. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. The best example I can think of for this is Cult of the Lamb. And I think something similar happened here.

I found Wonder to be almost entirely spectacle at the cost of interesting mechanical innovations. And before you stab me, yes, I do mean the wonder flowers. The thing about the wonder flowers is that while what they do is new for Mario, it’s not new for games or even platformers. And I don’t even think Mario does it best. Mechanics like being chased by your shadow have been done in Celeste, and other 3D Mario games. Singing piranha plants are fun, but this demo level from Billie Bust Up feels like it executes the idea much better.

Anyway, I didn’t do a full writeup on Wonder because I think it suffers from the same problem as Cult of the Lamb. Because I play a lot of games, I’ve seen these perfectly fine mechanics done better elsewhere, even though they are executed here with in a very polished way.

But yeah, I felt robbed of $60 after playing this.

Last Train Outta’ Worm Town

Last Train Outta’ Worm Town has a long name, long enough that I’m just going to refer to it as Worm Town from here on out. If it’s good enough for the opening menu screen song, it’s good enough for me. It’s probably not good enough for any level of SEO, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Worm Town is an asymmetric hunter/hunted game in the vein of Dead by Daylight. It’s very clearly inspired by the 1990 film Tremors, so much that I’m confident making this statement without having actually ever seen the movie.

Here’s how gameplay works. Players play either as either a surviving human, or a worm. Humans win by completing a set of tasks, including finding a special key, clearing the train tracks of obstructions, and refueling the train with random objects. Worms win by eating all the delicious humans.

Maps for gameplay are semi-randomly generated. A few features will always be present in approximately the same place. For example, the train is located in the middle of the of the map, and the quarry is always in the north east. However the locations of rocks, cactus, clusters of buildings, and consumables are randomized.

The human player controls and systems on their own are fairly limited. You can pick up and store items. You can carry items up to a total of 3 weight units, plus one item in your hands. You can throw items away from you. There’s also a set of equip-able items that tend to be single use, including a rifle and a zipline that I still don’t actually know how to use.

The worm is much more interesting. The core mechanic to the worm is simple. You can’t see human players if they aren’t moving on the ground. As a result, humans are invisible on top of buildings, large rocks, or while on the train. However, you’re much faster than humans, and you have a short cooldown jumping attack to launch to launch yourself into the air. You can also burrow underground for even faster movement.

Personally, when playing with my friend group, we’ve found the game to be a bit biased in terms of the human players, and it’s also not a very deep game. It’s possible that the game is much more fun with higher player counts, but I haven’t experimented with that.

But I still recommend Worm Town, mostly because of its pricing model. See, only player needs to actually own the game, and everyone else just downloads the free version.

For $8 bucks, a game that everyone can download and play pretty quickly, Worm Town is a pretty decent time. It’s not as fleshed out as many other games in the genre, and the controls don’t always work, but it’s really good as a medium level filler game when no one else in the discord can agree on what to play.

Ed Note: This writeup is a bit light this week. I’m heading out to PAX Unplugged 2023 shortly, and I need a bit more time for my other writeup. If you’re also gonna be there, why not hit me up on Twitter?

The Finals – First Impressions

Naming your game The Finals is a bit of a crime against words. It also makes me wonder if the game ever had some sort of comp scene, what that would be called. The Finals finals? Finals of The Finals?

Regardless of the weird naming, The Finals was neat enough for me to put 7 or so hours in. So here are some first impressions after that time.

And this is where I’d put my in-game screenshots, if I’d taken any before the beta went down.

Gameplay

The Finals is a multiplayer shooter, and most of the game’s novelty and innovation comes from everywhere except the shooting. The Finals’ innovation starts with its game modes: Cashout, Quick Cash and Bank It.

Gamemodes

Cashout and Quick Cash follow the same general structure, but with different numbers of teams and objectives in the game. In both cases, the goal is simple: get to a box, bring it to a deposit point, and then defend it while it deposits.

In Cashout, the game’s competitive mode, it’s four teams of three against each other, and in Quick Cash it’s only three teams of three. The scoring also changes between modes. Quick Cash requires 20,000 points to win, and only spawns 10,000 point boxes, making it effectively the first team to get two points. In Cashout, it’s 40,000 points. In addition, getting team wiped costs a large amount of points.

Bank It is closer to something like the dog tags mode from Call of Duty. There are various coin spawns around the maps, and enemy players drop the coins they’re carrying when defeated. Once picked up, coins have to be deposited in boxes that spawn in for about a period of 90 seconds to actually be added to your score.

What’s interesting about the game modes is that while I was playing them, they did generate a bunch of interesting decisions. Is it better to rush an enemy team that is trying to capture, or just to go after another objective on your own? Should you go in now, or try to wait for the third team on the map to attack first, then swoop in to clean up?

Traversal

The most interesting part of The Finals for me is the traversal, and traversal mechanics. In the context of this game, that can mean several things. It can mean putting down a zipline to go over a gap, a jump pad to make a surprise entry into a skyscraper, or a dash to zoom down alleyways.

Or, if you’re me, ignoring that and smashing through everything in your path.

One of the biggest features in The Finals is a incredibly high level of destructibility. Almost all smaller buildings and objects can be blown up or smashed to pieces, allowing the impromptu creation of entrances and exits. I’ve played games with high destructibility before, and often they end up turning the map into a giant pit as players destroy and destroy and destroy. But The Finals neatly manages to avoid this pitfall (ha) and maintain the structure of its maps while allowing much of them to be destroyed.

The end result is that a coordinated team can go across a gap, up 5 stories, and then through most of an office building in about 15 seconds. For me, this was the most fun part of the game, and it was a shame that only one of the loadouts I played really had the ability to conduct emergency home renovation. Which is as good a time as any to talk about the loadout system.

Loadouts

Loadouts in The Finals start by choosing a body type. There are three, ranging from heavy to light, with each having a different pool of items and weapons to equip, as well as different specials, speed, and HP.

I mostly played the heavy class, so I’ll use it as an example here. After picking heavy, you have 1 special slot, 1 weapon slot, 3 equipment slots, and 4 backup slots. The weapon slot holds a primary weapon. For the heavy, these include a large machine guns, a sledgehammer, flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.

Equipment slots contain grenades, walls, and other supplemental items like a rocket launcher. The Finals doesn’t have an external ammo system. Instead, while guns have to be reloaded, everything else is cooldown based.

Finally, the backup slots. Anything except special abilities can be placed into these slots, and they can be swapped out mid game. It’s important to note that even if you put a primary gun into a backup slot, you can’t swap it with a equipment slot while in game, only your primary. In addition, swapping items isn’t possible in some of the modes.

Overall, the loadout system is fine, but the lack of sidearm or secondary weapon to close out fights felt really weird. Presumably, those are supposed to be ended with say, flame grenades, but it still feels off for a fire fight to pause while both sides scramble to reload.

Overall Thoughts

The Finals was fairly fun. If I was grading it, I’d call it fine. There are a bunch of impressive things about it, including the terrain destruction, and the high fidelity while doing so. Does that mean I think it’s gonna succeed?

Not really.

I’m not sure how much space there is in this market for live service games, and make no mistake, The Finals is a live service game. It feels like it’s trying to primarily compete with something like Apex Legends.

Now, I could be wrong here. If the team creating The Finals is small enough, and they can capture a small portion of their playerbase as a long term audience, maybe it could become self-sustaining. But I could just as easily see it going the way of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt.

Perfectly good game! Interesting mechanics! Relatively fun! But might not hit critical mass. Same thing happened for Gundam Evolution.

It’s kind of depressing to continually see this pattern repeat, but hey, many of these projects have been in progress for years. I have to wonder if we’ll see this sort of thing continue.

Author’s Note: All the voice acting in The Finals is done with generative AI, a point covered in this podcast. Some people are, unsurprisingly, rather unhappy about this.

Pikmin 4

Overall I like Pikmin 4. I have issues with how its mechanics play into the game’s overall theme and aesthetic, and I have skeletons worth of bones to pick with the game’s difficultly curve, but I liked it. I would recommend it. If you want a game that doesn’t quite play like anything else, grab this.

Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s strangest franchises. An apocryphal tale states the series’ designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create the game after watching ants while he was gardening.

Here’s Pikmin 4 in one sentence: “Pikmin is a game about strategically managing ants. Except the ants are mobile semi-sentient plants and everything wants to eat them.”

As a summary, it hits a lot of high points. Pikmin is a strategy game. Your units are adorably small, and the Pikmin, while not stupid, have the same amount of self preservation skills as an ant. They also exist in a world where they are the very bottom of the food chain.

Story-wise, Pikmin 4 is the lightest in the series. The main game modes have unlimited days to work with, even though the time pressure is still present. The story does what it needs in order to serve the mechanics.

Mechanics

Gameplay in Pikmin 4 takes place across zones. Each zone is a single large map that can be revisited. Each visit is one day, lasting about 16 minutes.

Unlike other RTS games, the player only has direct control of two units. These are Oatachi and a custom player character. Oatachi is an upgradable space dog, and the Rescue Team member is a small alien in a spacesuit.

Across these zones, the goal is to explore and retrieve treasure and castaways, and delve into dungeons. There are other game modes. I’ll cover them later.

There are two pillars to Pikmin’s gameplay: real time combat, and strategic management and planning. The real time combat is simple to explain. The player character and Oatachi can command a force of Pikmin to follow them, and instruct them to interact with objects or attack enemies by tossing Pikmin directly onto those enemies.

The indirectly controlled units, the Pikmin, come in several different flavors. As this is the fourth game in the series, there are now seven types. Using the right one for the right task is often necessary. For example, don’t throw the yellow Pikmin (electricproof) into the fire.

Pikmin will attack enemies that they’re tossed onto. Most enemies will eventually shake Pikmin off, flinging them to the ground. Both Oatachi and the custom PC can whistle to call fallen back Pikmin to the main group. While Oatachi the PC control mostly the same, they do have some of their own strengths and weaknesses.

These are the micro mechanics of Pikmin, small interactions dependent on mechanical skill. But they’re fairly subservient to Pikmin’s macro mechanics, a term the game even has it’s own word for: Dandori.

Pikmin’s macro strategy revolves around a really interesting push/pull tension. The player has a limited number of Pikmin, and can only control their own character and Oatachi directly. Ultimately this turns Pikmin into a sort of resource allocation/routing game, where the real question becomes “What is the minimum number of Pikmin I can allocate to any single task, and still complete that task in a desirable manner?”

Combined, this is what makes up Pikmin’s mechanics: the high level ability to plan and route individual enemies and encounters, and the quick twitch ability to deal with enemies effectively (and respond when things don’t go according to plan).

Game Modes

Pikmin 4 has multiple game modes. They all use pretty much the same controls, but I do want to cover them quickly.

Overworld Expedition: As mentioned above. Adventure around a large map with a 16 minute timer looking for treasure and enemies.

Dungeons: Can be entered from the Overworld, bringing Pikmin with you. With no timer, dungeons made up of a series of floors, with various challenges, often with a themed gimmick (ice, conveyer belts, etc), and a boss fight at the end. You can’t refill Pikmin during a dungeon.

Dandori Challenges: Also entered from the Overworld, these are effectively puzzle rooms. You’re given a set amount of starting Pikmin, a goal, and a time limit. Beating them requires getting a certain amount of points, or completing the goal within the time limit.

Dandori Battles: The player faces off against an equivalent NPC to try to gather more stuff than they do over a given period of time.

Night Explorations: The easiest way to describe these might be “tower defense.” The player is dropped into a night time version of a day time area, and has to defend an object called a Lumiknoll until time runs out, or all enemies in the map are defeated.

They differ in two key ways from day time, in that enemies will periodically aggro and actively attack the Lumiknoll in waves, and that the only Pikmin available are Glow Pikmin. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental damage, and also warp back. The end result is a fairly different experience than normal gameplay.

Shipwreck Tale: Closest to something like a New Game+, this mode has the player trying to complete a separate set of objectives on the same maps, but with only 15 days. It’s much harder than the base game.

End Result: Pikmin has a lot of pretty different content.

Bugs, Minor Issues, and Bones to Pick

Pikmin 4 isn’t perfect. One of my biggest issues with the game is that it has pretty terrible load times, taking forever to transaction between zones and dungeons. This is mostly not an issue, except for when you find yourself jumping in and out of a given dungeon floor to farm a specific type of Pikmin.

There were a few graphical issues, but far more annoying were some of the bugs related to the game’s task system. There’s very clearly a hidden system that manages the player’s actions around throwing Pikmin at certain interactable objects. These can include ropes to be unspooled, or sticks be dug up and used as a shortcut. Sometimes it just breaks.

Here’s an example: I would throw Pikmin on a rope, but they would fall off the ledge near it. The game considered them to be still performing the rope “task” but there was no way for them to get back up. So when I threw additional Pikmin, the hidden system managing the task wouldn’t let them interact with the rope, because as far as the game was concerned, I already had the max Pikmin that could be assigned, even though some couldn’t actually reach it.

This is intended to be an anti-frustration feature, as it actually is mostly visible when the game stops you from tossing more Pikmin then required to carry an object. But it was still annoying.

My biggest bone though, has much more to do with tone than mechanics.

Pikmin: Ants or Locusts?

Pikmin has a weird tone. It’s a tone that I generally enjoy, one where you lead small plant creatures against monsters fifty times their size, something captured quite well by the Pikmin 2 box art:

There are a few things underlying this tone, but one of the biggest ones is an unspoken statement that Pikmin are underdogs, and they are the bottom of the food chain. They are small, individually quite weak, and live in a giant world of terrible things.

So here’s the problem: Pikmin 4 doesn’t respawn enemies in the overworld once they’re defeated. It’s a reasonable design choice to allow anyone to progress through the game, and it means that obstacles don’t have to be dealt with more than once.

But it also means that after a certain point in the game, every map ends up feeling completely empty and wiped out, stripped clean of wildlife by the Pikmin. And it’s kind of a weird feeling, more like you’re commanding a group of loathsome locusts, instead of adorable ants.

I get why they did this, but it does lend the game a really weird tone.

Difficulty Curve

One of the strangest things about Pikmin 4 is the difficulty curve. I would say that approximately 80% of the game is incredibly easy, to the point of being a non-challenge. Then there’s the other 20%.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are two pictures.

These are my total stats for the game as to Pikmin lost/grown. I lost a total of 336 Pikmin, not including rewinds and redos.

And these are my stats for Cavern for a King, the final dungeon of the game. Total losses, with rewinds, for a single dungeon are 61 Pikmin.

21% of my total losses in the entire game came from this single dungeon and that’s including the game’s system for save scumming (rewinds).

Every dungeon in the game has a maximum of 5 floors (except for a single other dungeon with 6 floors), and usually 1-2 to boss fights .

Cavern for a King has 20 floors, 15 of which have bosses.

Up until this point in the game, I was actually going to write this article about how disappointingly easy Pikmin 4 was. But then Cavern of Kings was much harder than every other dungeon. The final night exploration missions required more save scumming than every day exploration combined. The final super secret challenges are incredibly difficult.

It’s a super weird thing because it’s not a bump in difficulty or a smooth escalation; it’s a massive jump. The term “Vibe Check” comes to mind, as it just feels like at some point, the developers pulled off the kiddie gloves with no build up in-between, and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion

I liked Pikmin 4. I recommend it. It’s supremely weird, and there really aren’t any other games like the Pikmin series. Pikmin 4 isn’t a perfect entry, but it’s very fun overall.

Even if it does have a difficultly sheer rock wall instead of difficulty curve.