Pikmin Bloom impressions after six months

For reasons that aren’t entirely logical, I still like to play Pikmin bloom. It’s been almost six months since Niantic’s running companion app launched, and my routine hasn’t changed much in that time. Every day I try to get my steps in. I often don’t succeed. I sometimes earn way too many steps by riding with my phone in my pocket. I occasionally go out of town and have to wait weeks for items I discover there to find their way to me. But every day, several times a day, I get in touch. I feel like I’m achieving something.

I’m not. I let the numbers go up. And I’m still trying to understand the appeal of it all because it goes against so much of what I usually like about games.

On a mechanical level, there isn’t much play here. You have tasks to complete that occasionally require a touch of strategy. And there are ways to tweak your squad. But in general it’s about walking. You go to find seedlings, go to grow them, go to get food to feed them. In a typical game, this would lead to something. Breeding more Pikmin would unlock different types of gameplay or new stories to explore. Here you plant flowers and fight mushrooms, but neither is a challenge. You essentially build your team to keep building your team.

A big part of that, I imagine, is that Niantic needs to make money, and the more it can get you thinking about the numbers, the more likely you are to spend money making those numbers faster. Which is odd in a game centered around walking, since you’re essentially cheating yourself, but it’s done responsibly – the game isn’t holding back key features unless you pay, and I’ve yet to spend (or feel me how I have to spend) a dollar for it.

Without the typical challenges I look for in games, I find that a lot Pikmin bloomThe appeal of stems from what sounds pretty boring on paper: it’s satisfying to see new technology work well.

Games set on real maps aren’t entirely new at this point, but it’s still fascinating to see yourself in two worlds at once, and Niantic’s technology has evolved enough to make it all run smoothly. In this case, you’re essentially playing the role of a post office attendant, and it’s fun to send out Pikmin and watch them keep coming back. Even the smaller details, like the way the app uses vibrations, feel so refined that playing it feels like a taste of the potential of what games can be in the future.

I also love the passive collaboration of everything. not how Pokemon Go and penetration, Pikmin bloom does not contain competitive elements. I remember the developers of travel At one point there was talk of removing features that would allow players to negatively impact each other online, and it seems like Niantic took a similar approach here. You can plant flowers alongside other players and team up with other players to fight Mushrooms faster, but the design limits you from doing anything that would ruin someone else’s experience.

It reminds me of Noby Noby Boy or Curiosity: What’s in the Cube?insofar as you are all working together towards a common goal, although I assume that in the latter case everything has fallen apart (and arguably was not “shared” to begin with).

I wish all my time spent led to something more concrete. Not just items to collect, but things to do. A final. However, as I keep reminding myself, this would clash with the idea that this is an exercise companion app, if not more than it is a game. And perhaps more importantly, it would unfortunately also mean that I would have to stop playing.