Ciph’s Cabinet

Bi-Weekly Game Reviews 

Christopher Curtis 

Pikmin has the potential to be a real comfort game, and if you find real-time-strategy games daunting at all, this is one I can wholeheartedly recommend beginning your journey with. 

The gameplay loop is simple. As Captain Olimar, you have 30 in-game days to repair your spaceship. You will do so with the help of your little buddies, the titular Pikmin. They are scavenging little critters who will carry just about anything—from ship parts to wildlife carcasses—back to your base with the power of teamwork. Seems simple enough, right? Yeah, it is. But it’s also so much more. 

Perhaps fittingly, it really is “the little things” that make Pikmin such a special game. The five areas you get to explore each invoke a feeling of serenity, bursting at the seams with both the tranquil and violent aspects of nature’s beauty. The predators aren’t even really enemies—they mind their own business in the wilderness and sometimes even sleep—until they catch your scent, when they will indeed assert their higher position on the food chain. Combine this with the underspoken yet quite soothing soundtrack, and the goofy noises just about every critter makes, and it’s really easy to find yourself immersed in this planet’s natural order. 

Each of the three varieties of Pikmin you find have their own strengths. While you can create just about as many as you’d want, you can only deploy 100 on the field with you at any time. This creates a fun micro-strategy of how many of each type to bring, who to keep with you while exploring, and who to carry resources back to base. That last part is especially important, as in order to keep a healthy pool of each Pikmin type, they need to harvest the wildlife; this means fighting predators, which likely means many a Pikmin death. Don’t forget, you also have that 30 day time limit, and I do mean day. By nightfall, you must leave the planet’s surface, leaving behind any Pikmin who weren’t with you or at base. Unfortunately, these little friends will not survive the active predators at night. 

If this went from sounding simple to stressful, don’t worry. Those 30 days of 13 minutes each is honestly plenty of leeway, and you don’t even need to recover all your ship parts to beat the game. Feel free to take your time learning the game’s mechanics at your own pace. Get lost in the charming—albeit visually 2001—world laid out before you, and learn about the ecosystem naturally through play and diegetic journal entries. Perhaps you’ll find a new comfort game in Pikmin (or its three sequels) and an appreciation for RTS games as a whole through its accessible yet deep take on the genre. 

Pikmin was originally released on Nintendo Gamecube and later for Wii. It is also available on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 via the remaster Pikmin 1 + 2. 

Gameplay: 9/10 

Writing: 6/10 

Aesthetics: 6/10