Tinykin Reviews
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need to know
what is it? A 3D platformer in the style of Pikmin.
Expected payment: $25/£19.50
release date: come out now
Developer: splash team
Publisher: tinyBuild
Comment on: Intel i7 8700K, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070
multiplayer game? Do not
Association: Official website(opens in a new tab)
Let me get the disappointment out of the way first. In Tinykin, you play as a young interstellar traveler who commands a group of tiny minions to navigate an oversized environment, but it’s not the PC-compatible Pikmin I’d hoped for. Take a deep breath with me. If we start mourning now, we can appreciate Tinykin for what it is: a delightful, laid-back platformer frolicking in a world carefully rendered from a bug’s perspective.
You play as Milodan, a researcher from a distant planet, a distant future whose humans don’t remember where they came from. When Milo launches an experimental transport plane to track down his hypothesis about humanity’s interstellar origins, his teleportation technology not only traps him in another world – it also shrinks him to a miniature scale. Milo wakes up in the house, an abandoned 90’s house inhabited by an insect society, who remember the house’s original owner as an absent god, and the Tinykin, a mysterious race of elf, who have a crush on Milo. command to respond uniquely. As Milo, your goal is simple: use your Tinykin to collect six components from the House’s swarm, then reassemble a machine to teleport home.
(Image credit: tinyBuild)
The inspiration for Tinykin was evident from the start, as your dozen or so color-coded comrades were ordered into place with familiar whistles, raising an oversized hut with their own synchronized “hut-hut-hut” grunts. object. But the mechanical similarities were short-lived. Pikmin is a hybrid RTS, while Tinykin is a 3D platformer that is more Banjo-Kazooie-like and has a more relaxed vibe.
Yes, you’re solving all your problems game by game. But no real decisions are involved because there is no way to use them incorrectly. Each area requires a limited amount. You can’t waste or endanger them or accidentally drown an entire squad and feel bad about yourself for a week. In Tinykin, Tinykin is surprisingly irrelevant.
At first I was surprised how few ideas they asked for: the only logic involved is whether you currently have enough Tinykin to deal with the obstacles in front of you. If yes, then just drop the necessary number of Tinykin bombs until something explodes. If not, then run around and pop a handful of purple eggs until you can hold that cob. Pikmin makes you think about when, where and how to put your powers in, Tinykin just wants you to passively collect them as you run around.
If I’m reading this, I hope this bothers me. But luckily Milo felt good on her own to move around, and I was finally happy with where my Tinykin lived: facilitating my movement around the house, not being the only way I was involved in it. While the Milo’s sport kit isn’t very deep, it feels great to drive. He has a limited-time bubble glider that floats through gaps. In lieu of a sprint button, you can instantly use a “soap board” to glide and grind across the House’s solid surface — and crucially, it has an endlessly spammy kickflip button.
(Image credit: tinyBuild)
Whether you’re playing platform games or throwing Tinykins, Milo’s movements are snappy and responsive. Jumping, running, and deploying his bubble glider all luckily escape the kind of fumbling common on other platforms. I didn’t stumble over inexplicable geometric collisions, or because I was sure I would make a missed jump. Moving in Tinykin feels clean and satisfying, without any frustration, making moving around its vastly shrunken world more than a pleasure.
That’s fine, because the house is the real star of Tinykin, not the titular creature itself. Its rooms are home to different parts of the insect society, each forming a separate level with its own theme and atmosphere. In the lair, the pious shield worm erected a cardboard church. Meanwhile, the bathroom has been transformed into a permanent silverfish nightclub. Tinykin’s environmental artists gain incredible mileage from the simple joy of seeing oversized household objects rearranged into insect-scale architecture and geography. And there are no spiders to see. Arachnophobes rejoice.
(Image credit: tinyBuild)
Tinykin is full of pleasing visual details, from the fields spread out by green sponges in farmland on the kitchen floor, to the pushpin furniture in the food canister apartment building. For me, these are the main bonuses for navigating all the nooks and crannies. That’s good because, frankly, none of the actual collectibles you collect as you walk through Tinykin’s room are very powerful.
Pollen clumps are scattered across the house’s landscape, and if you collect enough pollen in a given room, you can increase the duration of your bubble glider. But reaching that threshold is kind of automatic, easily accomplished by absently grabbing nearby clumps as I gather my must-have Tinykin horde in each area. Meanwhile, the collectible lore items aren’t of much interest, as the central mystery surrounding the house and how it relates to Milo’s research is one that I can easily explain with a wave of my hand. Still, I get excited when I catch a glimpse of an egg or faint pollen in the distance—not for the collectible itself, but for what I see on the road.
(Image credit: tinyBuild)
The fiction of this small world makes me less invested in my Tinykin than the mechanic – out of dozens of interactions with bug NPCs, maybe 10 people have anything to say to them, or I have The incredible ability to guide them. Neither they nor Milo had enough charisma to make me feel like the whole experience was integral, which made me wonder why, instead of a vague Harry Potter space dweebus, I’m not a cool ladybug or something. A cool ladybug with unlimited kickflips. Overall, the article didn’t get much success. When its layered bug society doesn’t clumsily dabble in introductory political theory, it’s a tool for cookie-cutter reference humor. I regret to report that we are apparently still making a “cake is a lie” joke in 2022.
But even after making me a space elf, Tinykin conveys an innate childlike joy of climbing on a small thing that has suddenly become very big. That’s clearly the goal, and Tinykin isn’t overextending its ambitions. It’s a happy, laid-back six-hour or so platformer in a small, dynamic world. No more and no less.
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