First, let's get the disappointments out of the way: in Tinykin, you become a minuscule interstellar traveler, commanding an army of minuscule minions to navigate an oversized environment, not the PC-compatible "Pikmin" I had hoped for. Let's take a deep breath together. It's a fun platformer, a leisurely romp through a world lovingly rendered from an insect's point of view.

You play as Milodean, a researcher from a distant future planet. After activating an experimental transporter to pursue a hypothesis about the interstellar origins of mankind, Milo is not only stranded on an alien world by teleportation technology, but is also reduced to miniature scale. Milo awakens in the 90's in an abandoned "House". The House was inhabited by an insect society that remembered the original owner of the House as an absent god, and a mysterious race of gremlins, the Tainikins, who responded uniquely to Milo's commands. Using the Tinykin, he assembles a machine to collect six parts from the House's bug society and teleport them to the House.

Tinykin's inspiration is evident from the first moment when the twelve color-coded companions are ordered into position with a familiar whistle sound, marching with synchronized grunts of "hat-hat-hat," and carrying oversized objects. But the mechanical similarities quickly fade away. Whereas "Pikmin" is a remixed RTS, "Tinykin" is a 3D platformer like "Banjo-Kazooie" with a more carefree feel.

Yes, you're flying through dozens of Tinykin to solve every problem. But there is no real decision-making required, as they are never used incorrectly. There is a limit to the number needed in each field. We can't waste or endanger them, and we can't accidentally drown the entire squad and feel terrible for a week. In Tainikin, Tainikin is remarkably inconsequential. [The only logic is whether there are enough tainikins to handle the obstacle in front of you. If so, throw the required number of bomb tinnikins until they explode. If not, just run around and pump purple eggs until you can carry the corn cob. With pikmin, you have to figure out when, where, and how to deploy your forces, but with tainikin, you just passively gather forces while you're hanging around.

If I were reading this, this would bother me. But fortunately, Milo himself feels wonderful enough to move around, so I have come to be content with my tainikin's place in the house, where it is not the only way to engage with the house, but facilitates my movement within it. Milo's mobility toolkit isn't very deep, but the feeling of maneuvering is excellent. There is a time-limited bubble glider that allows you to float through the gaps. Instead of a sprint button, there is a "soap board" that allows you to slide and grind on the hard surfaces of the house.

All of Milo's actions are snappy and responsive, whether he is moving around a platform or throwing tinikins. Whether jumping, running, or deploying his bubble glider, he doesn't falter in the way that other platformers tend to. There are no inexplicable geometry collisions to stumble over, no missed jumps, and moving around in Tinykin is clean and satisfying, with none of the frustrations that make moving through a jumbo shrunken world less fun.

And that's great. Because the real star of Tinykin is the House, rather than the titular creatures themselves. Its rooms are home to different sections of insect society, each constituting a self-contained level with its own theme and atmosphere. In the study, pious shield bugs build a cardboard cathedral. Meanwhile, bathrooms have been transformed into eternal silverfish nightclubs. The environmental artists at Tinykin have reaped incredible rewards from the simple pleasure of seeing oversized household items arranged into insect-scale architecture and topography. Not a single spider is in sight. Spider haters rejoice.

From the greenback sponges of the fields spread across the kitchen floor to the studded furniture of the food tin apartment complex, Tinykin is chock full of delightful visual details. For me, these details were the main rewards for navigating the nooks and crannies. I was not as keenly motivated by any of the actual collectibles that I would collect as I moved through the rooms of Tinykin because, frankly, none of them were very strong motivators.

The house is littered with pollen clumps, and collecting enough in a particular room extends the duration of the bubble glider. However, meeting that threshold was automatic and could easily be achieved by unintentionally taking clumps nearby while collecting the customary tainikin swarms in each area. This was because the core mystery surrounding the house and how it related to Milo's research was one I could easily explain. Despite this, I was excited when I caught glimpses of eggs and pollen in the distance.

This small world fiction made me even less invested in Tinykin, just as the mechanics did. Neither they nor Milo had enough charisma to feel integral to the experience, and I wondered why I wasn't a cool ladybug or something, instead of a vaguely Harry Potter-like alien. A cool ladybug with endless kickflips. The writing is generally not very hit and miss. When the hierarchical bug society isn't clumsily dabbling in entry-level political theory, it's a means of cookie-cutter reference humor, and it's sad that in 2022 we still seem to be doing "the cake is a lie" jokes.

But even after making me look like a space buffoon, Tinykin still provides the child-specific pleasure of climbing on something so small that it's suddenly very large. While that is clearly the goal, Tinykin does not over-inflate that ambition. It's a lively little world and a leisurely six or so hours of platforming. Nothing more, nothing less.