First look: ‘Pikmin Bloom’, Niantic’s Walktastic follow-up to Pokémon GO, soft release today

If playing golf is the best way to spoil a ride, Niantic’s hope of Pikmin Bloom, the long-awaited companion / sibling title to the wildly successful Pokémon GO, is to create the exact opposite: something to “spice up your daily walks” and turn a daily walk into something flowery and joyous. With a worldwide release “in the next few days” through a staggered release starting today in Australia and Singapore, this was developed by Niantic’s Tokyo Studio in direct collaboration with Nintendo and, by design, is more of an app. of lifestyle than a “game”.

Where Pokémon GO becomes an obsession, Pikmin Bloom, according to Niantic CEO John Hanke, is software designed to to fit in instead of competing for attention in your daily routine. It makes you collect seeds as you walk, farm Pikmin by placing them in your hatchery pedometer backpack before plucking them, naming them (if you wish), and adding them to your little hunter-gatherer army.

We were invited to a Zoom group meeting with Hanke and Madoka Katayama, UX Design Lead at Niantic Tokyo Studio, where the pair outlined the ambitions of this new app and the wide audience they hope to attract. The ‘ages 8-80’ chestnut was rolled out in discussing the target demographic, though after spending time with the app in beta form, it’s certainly clear that this is a much broader experience than even something like Pokémon GO. Pikmin Bloom is a very nice walking app that counts your steps and gently promotes the mental and physical benefits of getting up and out of the house without the responsibility of catching them all.

In addition to the seeds, the Pikmin periodically collect fruit as you walk and this turns into nectar, drawing the attention of your little squad with the whistle (in AR mode if you want) and feeding them nectar causes the bulb on their head to bloom and produce. petals. The petals are used to activate a trail of flowers (to an appropriately uplifting melody) that are left where you walk and offer a couple of benefits. First of all, the longer you plant flowers, the higher your seed growing bonus will be (and consequently the faster your Pikmin seeds will grow). Second, leaving a trail of flowers around the giant plants in your neighborhood, the equivalent of Poké Stops in this game, will make them bloom too. You can do this on your own (if you’re willing to walk in circles for a while) or join other bloomers to get the flower flowing.

Pikmin Bloom is a very enjoyable walking app that gently promotes the mental and physical benefits of getting up and out of the house without the responsibility of catching them all.

While it’s a long way from being a mobile version of Nintendo’s RTS series, the app is packed with adorable audio hooks and cute bug moments that first attracted Pikmin to GameCube owners in 2001. Obviously, it’s not It happens that Pikmin Bloom gets a soft launch on the 20th anniversary of the franchise. In fact, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that Niantic has had this in storage for months and that they’ve only been waiting for the pandemic to subside to launch their walking app at a time when gamers were able to, you know, walk freely. However, Hanke tells us that although it has been in active development for a long time, the launch was not delayed by COVID-19, it has only taken time for this seed to sprout.

The team apparently experimented for a long time with different Nintendo IPs to find the best option. Hanke and Katayama didn’t specify, but one can only imagine that Animal Crossing was another series with wide enough appeal. However, we were told that the more ‘famous’ IP was not necessarily a good choice for a game that needed to interact and intersect with the real world, and Pikmin was apparently the natural choice.

When launching the app, you will be prompted to create a Mii avatar from a limited palette that is visible to other users if you wish (just like your flower trail, although you can turn off public visibility). The thinking behind these visible elements is to convey “traces and sentiments” from other players and to encourage collaboration in a shared asynchronous world, although you don’t need to participate in either one if you prefer not to.

Having played a game in its beta form, we haven’t had enough time to explore all facets, and various items are locked behind a leveling system that unlocks as you complete tasks and record steps. We’re told that you can send your Pikmin on expeditions to retrieve items, but the general flow of the growth-based game will be familiar to anyone who has hatched an egg in Pokémon GO, although taking Pikmin out of their backpack pots is endless. more satisfying than touching an egg.

The familiar way the battery drains while you’re away from home is perhaps less welcome, but mileage and batteries will vary. If you link the game to the health and pedometer apps on your phone, the steps you take while the app is closed will also count towards the total. Unfortunately, the game is very much tied to your Steps, which means wheelchair users will have to resort to shaking their mobile devices to grow those seeds.

This journal-style life journal item turns the experience into something more like a cross between a game and the Photos app ‘Memories’ slideshow.

Lifelog is another aspect that differentiates Bloom from GO: a daily summary of not only the steps she has taken, but also her mood and memories captured through photos taken from her Camera Roll (in case you grant access) . This everyday style element turns the experience into something more like a cross between a game and the ‘Memories’ slideshow from your Photos app. Special costumes for your Pikmin are also mentioned, something we haven’t seen in the game yet. In fact, there is, dare we say it, the mildest Miitomo scent on the edges of this app. Maybe it’s the Mii avatars, but the life mechanics and postcards (where Pikmin will retrieve postcards from the places you visit) are small but key indicators of the wildly different ambitions the developers have for this game.

In fact, as Katayama pointed out, Pikmin Bloom really isn’t quite as similar to Pokémon GO as you might first think. Monthly Community Days are planned, but if the games share anything except of course the underlying technology and map data, it’s a feeling of exploration and collaboration with strangers. The only layer of competition here, though, is bragging rights about your level, the medals you’ve unlocked, or the flower trails you’ve left around the place.

A glaring weak element of Pokémon GO’s design is its reliance on a bustling urban environment to function at its best, and Niantic has tried to address that issue here with “conscious decisions” made to make the game more accessible to players. in remote areas. Monetization seems to be very much in line with Pokémon GO’s Pokécoin approach: speeding up seed growth by purchasing an optional doohickey, but additional petals, nectar, and seed slots in one go, that sort of thing.

We have been told that Bulborbs may be added in the future and you may even lose your beloved Pikmin.

We are told that Bulborbs may be incorporated in the future, and it is even possible that he could lose his beloved Pikmin, although the director goes to great lengths to say that they do not ‘die’. He also mentions the possibility of new never-before-seen Pikmin making their debut in the game. But for now it’s about marching spreading flowers and forming a small army of plant friends.

Which is right. Our time with the game so far has been very enjoyable as a little accompaniment as we roam the city. We don’t foresee legions of Pikmin fans coming together to plant flowers in the same way that Pokémon GO find themselves to fight Raids and catch rare pocket monsters, but as a peripheral accompaniment to their daily walk, Pikmin Bloom has been overwhelmingly enjoyable.

There is that word again: nice. It sounds damning with mild praise, but it’s quite unusual for such an ambitious launch to be so bold and intentionally peripheral to the player. We are used to games, at least the most famous ones, taking over our lives, feeding on our unhealthy urges and sapping our vitality through addictive mechanics that turn ‘one more into seventeen’. There is an anxiety built into many of those experiences, a minor panic that you will miss an opportunity or fail. OMG what if I don’t catch all of them?

Pikmin Bloom is absolutely the antithesis of that; apparently content to just be there when you need company or a little distraction on a gray day while you run an errand. In that laid-back, low-maintenance capacity, the app makes a good first impression and feels like a flower-scented breath of fresh air to enjoy on a fall hike, especially after being indoors for most of the past year. It remains to be seen if his sheer appeal can translate into anything close to financial success for his stablemate, but we’ll definitely take him for a ride in the weeks and months to come.

Assuming our battery holds, of course.