#Pikuniku secrets full

Need to push a box to stack another one on top of it? Kick it. Need to knock a ball onto a switch? Kick it. There are not even enemies for the most part! The ability to kick isn’t so much an attack as it is a form of puzzle solving. The game is largely based around exploring, solving puzzles, discovering objectives and then completing them. You can walk, jump, kick, roll around with your legs tucked inside you, wear various hats with special abilities (such as watering flowers so they grow) and talk. It’s basically a semi-Metroidvania or semi-open world 2D platformer. Sunshine who is giving away “free money” in exchange for using his giant robots to take things that belong to others. A plot which involves a cloud-shaped creature named Mr. It isn’t long before Piku regains the townspeople’s trust, and ends up discovering details of the game’s surprisingly twisting yet light-hearted and goofy plot. Piku’s gender is ambiguous, with some characters saying “they” and others saying “he.” At the beginning of the game, Piku is awakened by a ghost and emerges from a cave, and is soon greeted by distrusting townspeople who are afraid Piku may be the mysterious “beast” they’d heard so much about. The player controls a creature by the name of Piku, a red jelly bean-like thing with two eyes, two legs, and nothing else. The game has a bit of a simple children’s book feel to it. The dialog is written with a very laid-back feel, with most of it written entirely in lower-case, and sentences often not even ending with a period.

And the music is as simple as the art, with few instruments playing at once in songs that are at times twee or tinny, at other times cute and charming. Or, another way to put it could be to say that it looks like what an old Atari game might look like if it were in HD but still had limited colors and simple designs.

Men children’s books, with very limited colors and simple shapes and round designs. Pikuniku has an art style like nothing else out there. retro-inspired games, “walking simulators” that are more about storytelling than gameplay), Pikuniku is distinctive enough that even among indie games, it sticks out. While that does include a lot of ideas used numerous times over (e.g. In the age of downloadable games from indie studios galore, seemingly anything can and will be created. Which brings us back to the website's warning: 'You can't do much, alone.' It's a bit of a red herring: in Pikuniku, your greatest companion is your sense of curiosity, the desire to keep chipping away at the surface and finding the weird treasures within.Pikuniku is a weird game.

#Pikuniku secrets full

It's like playing in the toybox of someone else's imagination, or like that little box of curiosities you had as a child, a sewing kit tin full of buttons and weird-looking coins and bits of fabric that meant nothing to adults, but everything to you-trophies of your own adventures. A demo I played a couple of years back involved talking to someone who really liked stairs. I have yet to find a use for them (apparently there's some secret stick-loving character hidden away somewhere…), but I wandered around the town with a stick proudly displayed above my head for all to see instead. It's possible in the demo to gather sticks. It places tiny things just out of your reach, and unlike other platformers, where those things will be keys, coins or other point-scoring items, Pikuniku's surprises reward you with its weird sense of humour instead.

Pikuniku knows that you-trained on platformers since you were old enough to hold something without sticking it into your toothless drool-hole-want to climb anything climbable and interact with anything interactable. And not only do those things respond with dialogue and retaliatory leg-jabs of their own, but sometimes your zealous kicking is the way to solve puzzles and help people. You kick people, bottles, buttons - anything that looks kickable, you kick, and you do so with a cute little squeak every time, like a tiny mouse doing slapstick. You're told early on that you can kick things, and so you do. Within my first fifteen minutes, I had rolled around a landscape reminiscent of LocoRoco, done a complicated flower-climbing puzzle where my reward was finding a bug doing a dance, and I found a secret underground rave, climbed onto the stage and kicked the DJ.īut the best thing is not the fact I can kick the DJ-it's that Pikuniku anticipates the fact that you, the player, are going to do something stupid. It's the kind of game you want to tell stories about.