August Assassination #1 (SG Win/ PoP Pick)

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

Tinykin is an incredibly charming and fun 3D collectathon platformer. It does everything I expect a game from that genre to do, but does it with so much charm and personality that you can't help but smile from end to end as you play the game.

From a graphical perspective, it's awesome. Sprites are cel-shaded 2D but live in a fully modeled 3D world, making it very easy to read interactable elements on the screen. You're a tiny human in a regular-sized house populated by insect factions, and every room looks distinct, brings something new to the gameplay, and are an absolute blast to explore. The 3D models have this clay look and feel to it, and while none of them are next-gen UHD quality of texture work, all of them work in the game's context. Plus, a very generous draw distance allows you to just admire with awe how busy and fun the rooms / levels are. Add to it incredible character animation, both for you and the NPCs. The cherry on top of everything are the animated cutscenes, that wouldn't look out of place on a Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon show.

I feel these kinds of games live or die by how fun their worlds are to explore, and as I said before, Tinykin excels in this department. The worlds are varied, dense, and easy/fun to navigate. If you thought Dark Souls did shortcuts well, I am willing to say Tinykin do them better. From the get-go you have a bubble glider (whose duration can be extended by completing side quests) and a soapboard (a skateboard with a funny name), and basic movement is that. Unlocking new Tinykin extends your moveset by a little bit, particularly with the green kin that allows you to climb a makeshift tower at will and provides a lot of movement options. Two of the other kins unlock general interactions that work like keys for specific locks (the purple kin for lifting objects and the red kin for blowing up stuff), and the last two kin are a bit lame -- one that connects electricity but is super niche and kind of annoying to place, and another one that makes stairs, mostly useless for you, just needed for moving objects around on your kin. While movement and gameplay are nothing revolutionary, they enable fun gameplay and exploration, which is the crown jewel here.

The music is soothing and energetic at the same time, and I'm listening to the OST right now and loving it. It enhances the mood desired for any environment. I love how chill and suave it is in certain areas, just to pick up pace as you climb higher on the level and the stakes are raised, for example. A standour example is a hidden area that gets pretty creepy and spooky, and the music immediately shifts to show this tension. It's awesome.

Last but not least, my main gripe with the game is the difficulty to 100% it. Collectathons are at their best when they give you the tools to explore it all and collect it all, and while exploration is absolutely viable, collection isn't. By the time I beat the game, I had collected everything in only one level (Balnea), but missed 3-10 pollen in the other levels. The problem is that, in the first level, I missed 5 out of 1600 pollen. How am I supposed to find the missing 5 without any indication? That would require a very unfun meticulous backtrack through every and each corner of the level, hunting for interactables that I might have missed, and that is where the game would stop being fun for me. I decided to simply drop the 100% plan and stop where I stopped, but I can see that being a major issue for completionists.

At any rate, Tinykin remains as one of the most charming, chill and enjoyable 3D collectathon experiences I had recently. Not because it offers sandbox levels with great movement, but because the levels are charming and navigable enough even with its limited moveset, and yet, feel fully-lived in and is incredibly charming. It ends before it gets old, and is easy to pickup again at anytime. A must play, 10/10.