The running animation is everything, clumsy and playful and enough on its own to make me chuckle. Tying all that together is your own character, a gangly, gamboling little thing that can roll up into a ball and blitz down slopes. Plant a boot in an NPC (an outstretched leg is your most effective method of interaction here) and they'll have a reaction or a single line retort, and elsewhere there are tinkling piano platforms, lampshades that ring like a bell when you hit them. Pikuniku's humour is mostly in what you do it's a puzzle platform that's blessed with the softest of physics, and it presents a world that's always got something for you to poke at. Its send-up of late capitalism is hardly Chomsky, but it does give Pikuniku's world a delightful edge it's a world of magic toasters and scheming acorns where you can sense the slight crack in the edge of the mile-wide smiles on the faces of forest folk, or spot the CCTV camera that pokes its head around the side of a grand old oak. There's warmth and wit in the characters that you come across - you play The Beast, a blob on two legs that emerges from a cave at the outset of Pikuniku and stumbles upon a cartoon world beholden to an awful conspiracy as it suffers at the hands of the corporation Sunshine Inc. There's the strong influence of Keita Takahashi's work in its aesthetic, though Pikuniku has a voice all of its own. It's ace.Īnd it, too, is amazing, a joyous, smart and imaginative adventure that's the rarest of things: a genuinely funny video game. Pikuniku is a game full of ideas that are introduced and then tossed aside for another new novelty. It is amazing, and if Pikuniku - a puzzle platformer for PC and Switch that's being published by Devolver - never goes quite as dark, it's definitely drinking from the same well. Which is part of the thrill - the weird, messy thrill - of Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared, the YouTube phenomenon that starts off BBC and then goes full Current 93, a nursery rhyme whose occult roots crack through all the sweetness. Availability: Out January 24th on PC and Switch.Not just your straight-up, in your face Chocky sinister either beneath the primary colours and blunt language of many a show there's the feeling that something's not quite right. Kid's TV shows, you've no doubt discussed with friends while waiting for someone to come back from the all-night garage with a packet of french fancies and a fresh packet of skins, can be kind of sinister. I was still standing in the nest and she replied “What do you mean it wasn’t you? Your feet are still on the shells!” Rounding up the chicks to make amends, one of them turned out to be a huffy teen (“why can’t I have my own life already”) and the other was fully conversant in self-help speak (“it’s true we haven’t bonded very much lately”).Playing out like an interactive episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Pikuniku is a perfectly formed three hour adventure. She demanded to know whether I kicked the eggs and I chose to deny all knowledge. Supporting that tone, the rest of the cast of characters have that specifically 2010s slight archness to them which keeps them from becoming twee.įor example, after kicking a couple of eggs I found in a nest and watching the chicks they contained flap off, a mother bird descended. Instead it remains at “more affable and PG version of a Dr Evil plot from Austin Powers” for the duration. Despite that premise, the tone never tips over into insufferable didacticism. What evolves from there is a cheery tale of endearingly bumbling and adorably illustrated violent resistance against a deep state social cleansing conspiracy. They settle on imprisoning you until you agree to repair the rope bridge connecting the village to the village crops (which you broke by bouncing on it) so that the villagers can tend their corn and be rewarded with rains of cash from the pink cloud. The local villagers believed you to be a scary beast and are not entirely sure how to handle the fact that you’re actually smaller than them, not threatening beyond delivering grumpy toddler-style kicks and pushes, and don’t look anything like their local beast lore descriptions. At first you’re just playing with them, perhaps enjoying the fact you can go a bit faster if you pull your legs in and roll, or bouncing around, trying to kick anything in the environment. Jumping, rolling, strolling and kicking are your primary forms of interaction. A useful exposition ghost prompts you to head into the fresh air so you can start exploring the 2D world. After an opening cinematic where a pink cloud offers you free money, you, a little red blob with legs, wake up in a cave on a hill overlooking a town.
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