Pikmin Bloom remains great six months later

polygon.com:

For reasons not entirely logical, I still love playing Pikmin Bloom. It’s been almost six months since Niantic’s walking companion app launched, and my routine hasn’t changed much in that time. Every day, I try to get my steps in. I often fail to. I sometimes earn far too many steps by driving 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 back to me. But every day, multiple times a day, I check in. I feel like I’m accomplishing something.

I’m not. I’m making numbers go up. And I’m still trying to wrap my head around the appeal of it all, because it runs counter to so much of what I typically like in games.

On a mechanical level, there’s not a lot of game here. You have tasks to do, which occasionally take a hint of strategy to complete. And there are ways to optimize your squad. But generally, it’s about walking. You walk to find seedlings, walk to make them grow, walk to get food to feed them. In a typical game, this would lead to something. Growing more Pikmin would unlock different types of gameplay or new stories to explore. Here, you plant flowers and fight mushrooms, but there’s no challenge to either. You essentially build up your team to keep building your team.

A big part of that, I imagine, is Niantic needs to make money, and the more it can get you thinking about the numbers, the more likely you are to spend money to make those numbers move faster. Which is weird in a game built around walking, since you’re essentially cheating yourself, but it’s done responsibly — the game doesn’t hold key features back if you don’t pay, and I have yet to spend (or feel like I need to spend) a dollar on it.

Without the typical challenges I look