Creating large spaces that are engaging to a player is a difficult design task. How do you encourage the player to explore the world you’ve created without them getting lost or bored? One of the best ways is to present them with short challenges that block their progress. You find a crumbling rock that you can’t break yet, come back when you have an ability. There’s a locked door whose puzzle you need to solve nearby, gain X amount of currency and you get to go to the next level. All are valid strategies to challenge the player and signal to them it’s time to look around and explore. But what if you took that last one and tied it to the abilities of the player? That’s what Tinykin achieves through the mixing of standard 3D platforming gameplay with Pikmin-like creature collecting.

Tinykin is a puzzle platformer created by Splashteam that ties your level progression to the number of creatures you’ve collected and, thus, what parts of the level you can access. When you start the game, you will be able to platform around a large section of a house and will collect Tinykin to overcome presented obstacles. You’ll first gain access to pink Tinykin, which allows you to move objects out of the way. Each object requires larger and larger quantities of them, so you will scour the level to get them. This is a standard game loop for a Pikmin-like game. However, where this formula makes a dramatic twist is when they introduce the green Tinykin.

Green Tinykin create ladders; each green Tinykin is a step, which allows you to climb to higher and higher places. This opens up a brand-new challenge that encourages the player to explore the area. Instead of having only very obvious obstacles like a box that needs X amount of pink Tinykin to push, now verticality itself becomes an ever-present obstacle that the player wants to overcome. If you see that there is a place above you, that’s now a challenge to find enough green Tinykin to get on top of that, and the higher you get, the more obstacles you face, which encourages you to further explore.

Furthermore, the game makes a brilliant move by restricting your Tinykin to only exist in the level where you collected them. This means when you walk into a new world, the power progression gets reset, and you are once again on a hunt to build your party but with a new Tinykin type, as each world introduces a new Tinykin with their own puzzle-solving ability. This interconnection between how many Tinykin you have in your party and the extent of your abilities allows the player to feel great progression as the game goes on. You can look back at the floor from the highest point in the room and think to yourself that if I didn’t explore and collect everything I could I wouldn’t be here now. 

Overall, Tinykin does an amazing job of creating a feeling I could ascribe to that of Breath of the Wild with its sense of exploration, “if you can see it, you can go to it” attitude, but on a tinier scale. The way the game ties its power progress to collecting designs an inherent want for exploration of these large open spaces. The more you collect the more you can explore, the more you can collect again, it’s a never ending feedback loop of fun. Check out Tinykin now.