Pikmin 4 owes its pristine loop to bedtime

polygon.com:

I caught up with Pikmin 4 over the holidays — Nintendo had a good 2023, didn’t it? — and it’s been a joy to slip back into the unique rhythms of this oddball strategy series. But it took me a minute to get comfortable with them.

Unusually for a Nintendo production, Pikmin 4 initially feels freighted down by the accumulation of features, ideas, and embellishments that have been layered on this gorgeously original design over 22 years and four games. With the addition of gadgets and your pup helper Oatchi, to name just two new systems, there’s a lot going on here, the weight of which somewhat flattens the core appeal of ordering a swarm of cute little plant men to battle bugs and dig up treasure. Like many game sequels with a long history, Pikmin 4 feels both too easy and too fussy in the early hours.

Happily, this impression doesn’t last, and one reason it doesn’t is a simple but crucial design choice the Pikmin series has had since the beginning. Every 15 minutes or so, the game sends you to bed.

There’s an in-universe explanation for this. In Pikmin, you take on the role of a tiny space explorer, exploring mundane locations like backyards and tide pools from an antlike perspective. This planet, foreign to your micro astronaut, looks like Earth and is scattered with the detritus of human living — fruit, buttons, Game Boys, origami cranes — but populated with fantastically bizarre and dangerous wildlife. These creatures increase in number at night, so when sunset approaches at the end of an in-game day (which is around 15 minutes long, unless you’ve descended into a dungeon, where time slows so much it effectively stops), it’s time to cut your losses, gather your Pikmin, and head back to base.

Nominally, this built-in