Pikmin is a series of games wherein you help an invasive species devour or displace the native population of creatures. In return for your ecological destruction, they help you gather trash.

It’s great. The original was an early demonstration of Nintendo’s experimentation when it came to its GameCube output. Pikmin 3 was one of the few comforts of owning a Wii U. Pikmin 2 wasn’t very good, and most prefer to pretend that Hey! Pikmin didn’t happen.

Pikmin 4, however, adds the most revolutionary feature imaginable to the formula: you can pitch the camera down to ground level.

LONESOME CROWDED PLANET

Every Pikmin game that comes along brings its own style and feel. Let’s run down the list again. Pikmin was almost a survival horror game as you raced to collect all the parts of your stranded ship before death comes to claim you. Pikmin 3 was all about hoarding, as you crammed your ship full of delicious fruits. Pikmin 2 was about being trapped in your own personal hell. Pikmin 4 focuses on a concept called “Dandori,” the act of organizing and executing tasks in an efficient manner.

But it’s also a lot more than that. It’s easily the least lonely game in the series.

You find yourself as a crew member of the Rescue Corps, who arrives at planet PNF-404 in search of Captain Olimar, who disappeared in the region. The story seems to be a reboot of the series’ ongoing narrative. Weirdly, however, Olimar isn’t the only person to wind up stranded on the planet. A lot of people have. It’s an introvert’s nightmare. And as a member of the Rescue Corps, it’s your job to find them.

You’re immediately partnered up with Oatchi, a weird, two-legged dog who changes the flow of the game considerably. It doesn’t take long before you can ride on him, and all your Pikmin can grab on. His dash can launch Pikmin directly onto their prey. Levelling up his skills allows him to carry massive items. It’s tempting to say that he makes things too easy, but then I remember that I could have just increased the difficulty, so I can’t really comment on that.

Still, he’s very empowering, and that can be a bad thing, simply because it kind of takes away from the feeling of being a castaway. Then again, so does the horde of other space-people you gather at home base. Frantic pressure is just not what Pikmin 4 is going for, but the side-effect of empowering you is that it makes you feel more like an employee. Like a gofer. A grunt.

TO-DO

And that’s maybe also appropriate because of the focus on dandori. It’s a weird situation where checklist busywork seems to be a deliberate focus rather than lazy design. You’re pushed to accomplish as much as possible in the smallest timeframe, even though, unlike the original Pikmin, there’s no deadline to get everything done. Except in the timed challenges, of course.

The caves I hated from Pikmin 2 are back. However, unlike Pikmin 2, they don’t feel like the main event. You spend a lot of time topside, but you still need to delve to get a lot of treasure, as well as all the castaways.

I still hate the caves, but they’re at least more forgivable in Pikmin 4. I probably wouldn’t even complain if not for the PTSD.

What I don’t hate is the dandori challenges. They come in two flavours: competitive and time trials. The competitive squares you off against a leafy analogue, and you have to accumulate more treasures and corpses than they do. There are ways to sabotage each other, or even directly attack, but the goal is to just stuff your onion with the most garbage.

The time trials challenge you to gather as much treasure as you can in a tight timeframe. Gosh, they’re fun. On the most challenging ones, you will probably need to retry multiple times to figure out the fastest way to get everything back to your base. They force you to really refine your priorities. These side events are normally pretty quick, meaning they don’t take away from exploring the world for very long. Unlike the caves, however, I could play these challenges separate from the main game. They’re great.

HEAD CANON

The topside stuff is great too, and that’s somewhat attributable to just how much stuff is in Pikmin 4. Setting down in a new area, you know that you’re not going to be able to explore it all in one day. Sometimes, new areas are blocked off until you’ve found a specific type of Pikmin. Even beyond that, my first order of business in any new area was to start opening up pathways and shortcuts, laying fertile groundwork for gathering garbage. That’s just proper dandori.

There are more areas in Pikmin 4 than any previous game, and while the spread isn’t as thematically diverse, there are enough standouts to make each one interesting. On this playthrough, I often tried to complete as much as possible before moving on. I had them 100% emptied by the end of the game.

One of the levels is the inside of someone’s house – someone’s house that doesn’t seem to have been abandoned for a very long time, if at all. It’s weird, since the Pikmin series has sort of suggested that it takes place on Earth after humans have been wiped out. It’s not very apocalyptic, but I guess exploring the rotting remains of our species would be kind of off brand. Still, I’m not changing my head cannon.

You’re also given tasks to complete by the castaways that start cluttering up your basecamp. These tasks aren’t really all that interesting, since they usually just involve things you’re going to accomplish just by progressing through the game. So, that’s maybe a wasted opportunity.

CARROT JUICE

To backtrack, the caves have returned. There’s modern open-world sandbox creep in here, as it can often feel like you’re just checking tasks off a list. You practically are! There are lists!

However, nothing is ever black-and-white. If there’s one major accomplishment here, it’s that Pikmin 4 makes checklist gameplay feel appropriate. It doesn’t feel cheap. In fact, writing the review, I got hit by a wave of good feels as I revisited memories of digging into new areas and going to work opening up shortcuts and pathways. Unlike a lot of modern sandbox games, it doesn’t feel mentally manipulative; there’s work you need to put in to get your reward.

In a lot of ways, Pikmin 4 is its own unique game that simply takes bits from its predecessors. It’s recognizably a Pikmin game, but the way it takes the series’ concepts and really focuses them makes the whole experience different. It doesn’t supersede the previous games, but rather sits alongside them. That’s great, because it means that when I get the hankering for some Pikmin, I get to consider what flavour I’m hungry for.

8/10

This review was conducted on a Switch using a cartridge version of the game. It was paid for by the author.