Progression rarely requires much thoughtful effort. You spend the rest of the game wandering through the small game world, encountering characters and helping solve their problems until, eventually, you find yourself fighting against Sunshine Inc, a giant corporation that is sending robots all over the land to harvest natural resources from the game's three regions. The opening tutorial doesn't take long, because the controls are simple: You can jump, causing Piku to spin haphazardly as he moves through the air, you can kick in any direction, and you can curl your legs into yourself and roll around in ball form. But the childish veneer is charming, and while Pikuniku isn't the deepest game around, it's lovely, funny, and engrossing in its own weird way.Īt the game's opening, your character-Piku, an entity made up of an oblong red body with dots for eyes and two long spindly legs coming out of it-awakens in a cave, prompted by a ghost to go outside. It's a game about battling a corporate takeover, and the writing has the playful, sarcastically irreverent tone you're more likely to see from someone in their 20s or 30s. A giant company pays a town by making money rain from the sky a trendy nightclub will only let you in if you dress 'cool' by wearing sunglasses you play a game someone 'invented,' but which is, essentially, just basketball mixed with soccer.īut Pikuniku (Japanese for 'picnic') never feels like it was designed specifically for children. It tells a simple story that doesn't always quite make sense, it's pointedly very silly, and there are scenes within it that seem to be based on how a child understands the world. With its simple character designs and a game world that often looks like a young kid designed it by cutting up and sticking together different bits of colored paper, Pikuniku sometimes feels like a video game adaption of a children's book.

Pikuniku wallpaper