Hands on with Tinykin - Preview
When I first saw Tinykin, my mind immediately jumped to Pikmin, and for a some very clear reasons, having now put the game through its paces, my mind still goes there, but it also goes well past that.
The general story of Tinykin is that you are Milo, and while you are a traveller, your arrival on Earth hasn’t gone to plan, as there are no other humans around, time has frozen back in 1991 and oh yeah, you are about 3cm tall. Milo realises something isn’t right and sets about finding away out of this new mess and back home, but to do that he will need some help and thankfully there is a talking insect willing to do that. Ridmi knows little about your plight, but he is willing to help still and has an idea of one way you might be able to move forward, but he acknowledges that it is going to hard, but while he is explaining the world you now find yourself in, the Tinykin, creatures known to uncontrollable, flock to Milo and listen to him.
The general goal in the build I played, was to collect two of the components required to build a piece of technology that was going to help Milo out, the first item was to be found in the Hall, which acts as the tutorial. The second area was massive, well as much as it is when you are 3cm tall, but this was where the bulk of the exploration and missions were located and it was also where many of the folks you encounter are located and again, they are all insects. For the most part, Milo controls like he would in any 3d platformer, move with the left stick, control the camera with the right, jump and so on. There are a few little things to be aware of, the first is that Milo has a bubble glider, which lets him float safely around, at least for a limited time, as it will pop eventually and the second is that in order to get around faster, Milo surfs on a bar of soap. The soap is also how you can grind the threads of web that connect one place to another, without it, you fall straight through it and then will need to use the bubble to no fall to your death.
Of course, one of the things that Milo can make use of, that no-one else can, are the Tinykin and while the developer have promised that in the final game there will be a good variety of them, each with their own skills in the build I played there were only two. One was your generic Tinykin, in that they can do a lot of simple tasks, carrying objects around, moving things out of the way, that sort of thing, the other one… well they went boom. The multipurpose Tinykin were green and the boom-boom ones were red, which was very help, but what was more helpful was that the game was context sensitive and that means more than sensitive to context. No what it meant was that if I was aiming at something that could be moved, when I threw the Tinykin, the game would throw the green ones, but if it was something that needed to be exploded, it would throw the red. When I first started lobbing those red ones around, I did worry about the possibility of running out of them, thankfully though the game was plentiful in providing them, so I could throw to my heart’s content.
The context sensitive nature of the throwing of them also means that if you do throw them and you happen to throw a red one, if you don’t hit something that can’t explode, it won’t blow up, saving your little guy for another chance later on. As far as finding things to use them on though, that is where exploring the world came into focus, the room itself was actually a music room, so there was a piano, lots of records and even a comfy looking chair, the kind of space you would want for yourself, if you are a musician or a lover of music. The insects that have taken up residence in this room have little bars, a comedy club that is somewhat lite on the comedy, a church and even a dangerous monster lurking within a dark and shadowy place. As I was exploring and speaking with the little bugs around the place, some would just have something inane to say, others would point me towards something I might not be aware of and others would task me with an objective.
The objectives ranged from finding a missing child, to repairing an ancient monument and while none of them were difficult in any sense of the word, they were still a challenge, mostly due to the platforming nature and the need to use the Tinykin. By challenge, I don’t mean that they were hard, the games platforming mechanics are quite solid and easily understood, but when you have to climb up the leaves of a potted plant, before leaping onto a shelf, before you then climb up even higher and one mis-timed jump can lead you to falling all the way down, the risk can be great.
Something that is great and I mean that in the best use of the word, is the games stunning presentation, now bear in mind that I only got to see the tutorial space and the first room, there is still the rest of the house to explore, but everything looks great. Milo for one is always facing the camera, even when you are walking away from it and at first, I wasn’t sure I liked it, but the more I played, the more I came to realise it was a great little choice. Now you get to see his reactions to events as they happen, much like how Starkiller in The Force Unleashed, held his lightsabres behind his back, so the player could see them. The rest of the characters all tend to pivot towards the camera as well and while at first, seeing the 2d cut-outs of Milo and the rest in the 3d world seems disjointed, it does actually work for the game. Also, the level of care that went into the Tinykin animations is great, just stopping and letting them do things while they wait, was something I never got tired of doing.
Tinykin might look like a clone of another game series at first, but you just need to play it, to understand that there is so much more going on. Thankfully I was able to explore the world of Tinykin at my own pace, which led to a lot of exploration and with that, came a lot of discovery. While the full game isn’t due out until the middle of the year, at least at this point, I for one can’t wait to discover more about it.
