

We were surprised to see a couple of framerate dips – it seems the Unity engine underneath is doing more work than the surface might indicate – but it wasn’t a consistent problem.
Pikuniku 2 release date psp#
That’s not to say it’s without challenge, but generous restart points and forgiving level design show that Sectordub is aiming to charm players of all abilities rather than craft real brain-teasers, and on those terms Pikuniku succeeds with flying colours.Īnd there are certainly plenty of colours flying! The shades and shapes you see in screenshots look lovely in both docked and handheld modes, and Pikuniku owes something to PSP classic LocoRoco in the look-and-feel department, with simple characters and buoyant, elastic animation really popping onscreen. You’ll come across more treacherous areas later on, but even the ‘dungeon’ areas are extremely forgiving – Pikuniku is the most accessible, approachable game we’ve played in a long while and with persistence even the greenest of gamers should have no problem getting through it. The joy of the game comes from exploration – finding ‘hidden’ passages behind walls with zigzag lines (containing trophies and other goodies) and speaking with NPCs with their endearing lowercase speech bubbles.Ĭomical boss battles follow the three-hits-and-done formula and a handful of minigames (including a fun little rhythm game) help fulfil the retro call-back quota.

You swing from hooks by lassoing them with a leg and the floaty physics are forgiving enough to throw yourself around without too much worry. The majority of puzzles involve kicking things with ‘Y’ (buttons, rocks, robots) or pushing objects onto switches to proceed. Hats are accessible via a menu on the left shoulder buttons, with a small inventory of collectible items on the corresponding right buttons. Different ‘hats’ enable you to make progress by, for example, watering a plant to create a platform or drawing a picture. You’ll journey through valleys, forests and mines on your adventure, dropping in on inhabitants in their various abodes and buying swag with the coins you collect. Jump is on ‘B’ and holding ‘A’ turns Piku into a legless ‘pill’ which rolls quickly over flat surfaces and squeezes into small spaces. The animation lends every member of the cast an adorable clumsiness as their legs struggle to keep up with their bodies. The eponymous Piku (joined by yellow/orange clone, Niku in co-op levels) is likeable despite being little more than a red pill with gangly legs. billboards pop up and he sends his robot minions to collect more and more resources across the world. What seemed like a good deal at first turns ominous when Sunshine Inc.

They enlist him to help deal with the industrious Mr Sunshine, a jovial pink dude harvesting the village’s corn crop in return for ‘free money’. You control Piku, a red cave-dwelling ‘beast’ according to local legend, although upon actually meeting him the villagers discover he’s harmless and lovely. Pikuniku is a primary-coloured platformer with light exploration and puzzle elements, and although the blurb assures us it’s dystopian, you’ll bound through this jaunty world with a grin on your face. Dystopias – why do we love them so? We get more than our fair share of them in video games, but when the audience feels like they’re living in Blade Runner already, how do developers keep things feeling fresh? If you’re Sectordub, you ditch the grimy neon and rain for a primary-coloured 2D world and make your robots cute and cloud-shaped.
