Tinykin

This is the best platformer I’ve played in recent years. I had excessively too much fun with it. It’s a game by a tiny French studio in Montpellier (I believe around 3 people) and it really should be better known as a game.

At first glance it looks like a Pikmin knockoff. I’m not the biggest Pikmin player, so I kinda wrote it off. A friend then told me it’s a great platformer so I finally played it months later. And it was amazing. Moving around is a blast. The tinykins are very cute and more akin to a move set than Pikmins. They have more in common with Kazooie from Banjo-Kazooie. The level designs are so creative I was flabbergasted. The environmental storytelling really goes hard. What do you mean, the insects have created a whole farmland out of the sponges in the kitchen? That’s so cute. And also very unhealthy. It is the first collectathon where I did not finish the levels 100% before moving on because I’ve been so excited to see what they did in the next level.

I didn’t expect to get a good story here, but it was surprisingly solid and well put together. I have a hard time finding flaws, I liked it that much. The fact that the character is 2D in a 3D environment does sometimes make depth perception a bit hard to pull of, but even that, I couldn’t care.