Pikmin 4 will turn you into an obsessive collector

polygon.com:

While exploring a garden in Pikmin 4, I found a tube of something called “refreshing goo.” As I instructed my small army of Pikmin, the flower-headed creatures who helped me carry things around the world, to bring it back to my spaceship, I wondered what it was — toothpaste, maybe? It was only later when I read the item’s in-game record that I realized it was actually blue paint, which the record described thusly: “Neither the color of the sky nor the color of the sea. Though it is nearly the color of both.”

Pikmin 4 is a game for those who want to take small things too seriously. This has been true of the whole series, which has always defied its initial appearance as kids’ games focused on exploration. The first game was hardcore: You had to direct your Pikmin to complete collecting missions before Olimar, your space explorer, expends his 30 days of oxygen on a foreign planet. Each new game followed the same formula, though each iteration less tensely, and with less time pressure. For the first time, in Pikmin 4, you’re not playing as Olimar but as the recruit to the space program who was sent out to rescue him. You explore new levels in order to collect treasures left lying around that give you sparklium, a substance that fuels your spaceship. As you collect more treasure, you unlock more areas and come across castaways, sometimes members of research teams but also tourists who came to this planet, like Olimar, hoping to shake up their lives with a new discovery.

Pikmin 4 not only eschews the first game’s time limit for less harsh daily in-game timers, but it also adds improvements to make keeping track of what you’re doing more streamlined. There’s a rewind function, a “go here” button that Google Maps-es you