Rating of
4.5/5
Puzzle-Platforming ‘Pikmin’-Lite
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/05/25
“Tinykin” is the second game from French Indie developer, Slashteam, whose initial game, “Splasher,” didn’t really make much of a… splash. As a ‘Meatboy’-style platformer that came out in 2017 just before “Celeste” (which had much more marketing… for some reason), “Splasher” flew under the radar while the team went back to the drawing board. For their second game, they changed genres from Precision Platforming in 2D to Collect-a-Thon Platforming in 3D, while also wearing their Nintendo influences on their sleeve: Specifically, “Tinykin” looks for all the world like it wants to be a ‘Pikmin’ clone, and that’s what initially got me interested in it. And while “Tinykin” does indeed share some basic concepts with ‘Pikmin,’ it’s gameplay focus is ultimately different enough to allow it to stand on its own… and it’s a truly well-done experience no matter how you look at it.
Presentation
“Tinykin” is built in the Unity Engine… but doesn’t really have much in the way of ‘tells’ that make it obvious that it isn’t either a fully custom engine or built in a ‘better’ engine, like Unreal. The game blends large, slightly stylized 3D environments with very flat, 100% 2D character designs. One of the few oversights from a visual design perspective is that characters are so flat that they don’t even have distinctive ‘front’ and ‘back’ appearances, instead always turning to face the player’s perspective. All of the art is very well done, though, as the highly cartoony characters have a ton of personality, which becomes even more apparent during the game’s handful of pre-rendered cutscenes. Environments aren’t quite as high-fidelity as they could be, as there is quite a bit of illegible text to be found… which could actually be excused from a narrative perspective.
Audio is just as lively and joyful as the visuals, with a handful of really great tunes accompanying each of the game’s stages. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game’s soundtrack is how dynamic it is, with the background music shifting modes seamlessly when they player enters different specific areas. It’s subtle in some places and obvious in others, but once I noticed it for the first time, I really appreciated the amount of attention to detail that went into this feature. The game is not fully voiced, with only one character speaking actual English (or French, or whatever your $systemlanguage happens to be). Other characters speak a kind of warbling gibberish – they are all sentient insects, so it makes sense – with a different ‘dialect’ for each major ‘ethnic’ group. I thought this was delightful as well, as the warbling gibberish really meshes with the stereotypical personalities each insect group displays.
Technically, “Tinykin” is incredibly solid in almost every way. It supports Xinput natively and doesn’t have a lot of annoying option menu entries that need manual tweaking and fiddling. It just works, and it runs flawlessly, with nary a glitch or hiccup to be found. Every way, that is, except the Steam Achievement integration, which is notoriously buggy (no pun intended), and frequently refuses to pop a few of the more-completionist-minded end-game Achievements, even when those achievements DO appear as being completed within the game’s own internal Achievement system. Still, a few minor issues in a useless ‘value added’ feature like Achievements is small potatoes when the rest of the game is so well done and obviously made with lots of care and attention to detail.
Story
“Tinykin” is the tale of Milodane (typically known simply as ‘Milo’) a young archaeologist living on the planet Aegis. Researchers in his field have known for a long time that Aegis isn’t the native homeworld of humans, so Milo sets his mind to tracking down the origins of humanity.
Using some sort of fancy space telescope – with built-in teleporter! – Milo follows a trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs through space until he finds a promising planet to explore… and promptly teleports there, with no way of returning. Fortunately for Milo, he is found by a friendly moth scientist, named Remi, who repairs his life support suit, but then informs Milo that no insects in the house have the technology to send him back home…. But! It’s possible that the final blueprint left behind by the insects’ mysterious god, Ardwin, might actually be able to send Milo back where he came from.
Sentient insects aren’t the only inhabitants of the giant-scale house that appears to be the entirety of the human home-world, as Milo soon discovers a bizarre species of one-eyed, somewhat-abstract creatures that the insects have dubbed the tinykin. Remi informs Milo that the tinykin always ignore the insects, and expresses surprise that the bizarre creatures are not only drawn to Milo, but seem willing to obey his every command.
Thus, Milo sets out through the various ‘rooms’ of the ‘house’ that is the world, searching for the components to build Ardwin’s great machine, with the tinykin in tow. In the process, Milo will meet all manner of colorful insect characters, solve insect diplomatic issues, and find all sorts of secrets, all ultimately revealing the origins and fate of humanity.
“Tinykin” is not a particularly long game, clocking in at around 8 hours for a blind playthrough, with two more hours to clean up the achievements. However, the pacing is perfect, and the blend of active and passive storytelling is incredibly well-done. The insects share their worldview, while the world itself has plenty of visual details that help to put the insects’ beliefs into perspective. I enjoyed every minute I spent playing “Tinykin,” and would love to see a sequel at some point.
Gameplay
It seems pretty obvious upon looking at screenshots or demo gameplay footage that “Tinykin” is a knock-off, or rather homage, to Nintendo’s ‘Pikmin’ series, where a tiny space explorer recruits large numbers of expendable local wildlife in order to salvage objects that will ultimately lead the way home. However, whereas ‘Pikmin’ does have a number of limiters placed on the player, such as the day/night cycle, and some games in the series having a hard limit on the number of days the player can spend exploring, “Tinykin’ has none of those. Furthermore, while in ‘Pikmin’ there are numerous forms of hostile wildlife the player must defeat using their expendable minions, in “Tinykin” there is no combat.
“Tinykin” is, at its heart, a Collect-a-Thon-style 3D Platformer in the vein of most Platformer titles from the 5th and 6th Generations. Milo can’t just create tinykin helpers willy-nilly, but must find the limited (and non-respawning) number of tinykin eggs within each room to build up his team’s abilities. Tinykin will NOT travel from the room where they were found, so each of the game’s half-dozen rooms are discrete sandboxes to explore, collecting tinykin, pollen, and solving problems for the locals, while simultaneously unlocking a plethora of shortcuts before ultimately claiming the coveted machine component at the end.
Milo can’t really do much of anything by himself. His abilities are limited to jumping, climbing ropes, gliding with a soap bubble around his head, and sliding on a tiny bar of hotel soap like a skateboard. Every other ability at Milo’s disposal comes from the tinykin who have joined him. Pink ones can carry heavy objects, red ones can kamikaze themselves to break obstructions, blue ones can channel electricity to complete circuits, green ones can form acrobat stacks that act as impromptu climbing walls, and yellow ones can link together to create temporary bridges. Each area, as mentioned, has a limited number of each color of tinykin who lives there, so if an obstacle requires more of a certain color than Milo currently has, exploring and finding more tinykin is the order of the day.
Collecting pollen is the main way to upgrade Milo’s space suit, granting him additional soap bubbles, and thus significantly increasing his glide time. The only other collectables to be found are artifacts for the insect museum, which go a long way toward helping the player piece together the world’s lore, but otherwise do nothing.
The entire time I spent playing “Tinykin,” I kept thinking to myself that it resembled a Nintendo project in terms of the absolute spit-and-polish perfection on everything, and just how much fun I was having. “Tinykin” isn’t a ‘challenging’ game by any measure, but it is nevertheless incredibly relaxing and joyful to play.
Overall
In a world where every other game is some grim Dark Fantasy or gritty Post-Apocalypse nightmare, “Tinykin” is truly a breath of fresh air. Everything about it, from the lively visual design, to the layered and dynamic soundtrack, to the thought-provoking story, to the polished platforming, just screams, “QUALITY.” This game truly deserved more attention in 2022, as it’s the type of sleeper Indie hit that I would enthusiastically recommend to anyone who claims they enjoy videogames.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 4.5/5
Gameplay: 4.5/5
Overall (not an average): 4.5/5
