PixlBit

I'm a big fan of the Pikmin series. My eyes are always on the lookout for games that use its minon-controlling mechanic like the Overlord games or Hotel Transylvania 3: Monsters Overboard. I even try and shoehorn that mechanic into games like Diablo II. The Necromancer character lets me command groups of skeletons and golems. So when TinyKin appeared on Game Pass one week, I had to play it. 

These be the Tinykins. They come in different colors to denote their individual powers. Some of them explode like those red ones. Some stack up to become climbable like the green ones. The pink ones can pick up things for you. Blue connect electrical circuits and Yellow create ramps. The good thing about this game over Pikmin is that you can collect a huge number of them with no apparent limit. Sometimes you need 20 or 30 pink ones to move a heavy object. 

Your character, and the tinykin, are small, very small. You and you tinykins are bug size, and the NPCs are litteral bugs. It's a little bit creepy that way, but only if you think about it too much. The settings are rooms in a house. You find yourself climbing shelves, crossing over and under tables, and even plunging into a toilet. You can surf on a soap bar across the floors or on spider's threads. Each level has various tasks to complete, and things to collect to beat the level. After that you can run two platforming time trial routes through each level as a bonus. 

I really enjoyed the story, which actually didn't become a major point of interest to me until the end. It's almost impossible to talk about it without spoilers though. Sufice it to say, things are not what they seem, and your goal becomes more cosmic in nature at the end. 

I finished everything I could in this game. There are a few tinykin in each level I still can't find, and although I tried the time trials, I didn't beat many of them. Controls work well, but moving at a fast speed it'll take trial-and-error to beat the wild rollercoaster-like dash through the rooms. This kind of thing isn't my favorite. All and all a delight, though. I hope a sequel gets made, and it might since it is sitting pretty high on metacritic right now.