How I Became Obsessed With ‘Pikmin Bloom’
On paper, there’s no way I should be obsessed with Pikmin Bloom. My history with the Pikmin series is short enough to fit inside a fortune cookie, only having picked up a few hours of the original game at a friend’s house when I was in elementary school. I’ve also always struggled to commit to mobile games, especially ongoing ones. But in this year’s strangest roll of the dice, I started actively playing Pikmin Bloom over the past week or so. Not only that, but I’ve started sneaking in the game wherever I can, creating artificial excuses to go walking when I would normally be sedentary. In that respect, Pikmin Bloom is kind of magical.
Pikmin Bloom is remarkable given my cynical and storied history believing that mobile games were garbage that corrupted other sectors of the gaming industry. To willingly lose myself in a game like Pikmin Bloom seems almost like a fever dream due to how uncharacteristic this behavior is for me. I didn’t realize how hooked I was until the evening I sat down to write this article; while I was waiting on a timer on my oven, I took the opportunity to pace around my house, up and down the stairs, farming extra steps for Pikmin Bloom. I heard the oven beep and was brought back to my senses, charmed at how silly my behavior was and bemused that I had squeezed in an extra 1,500 steps before dinner.
Understanding Pikmin Bloom
The allure of Pikmin Bloom is essentially identical to the wildly successful Pokemon GO, which I had dabbled with during its 2016 peak. Pokemon GO, despite trading in my childhood nostalgia, never quite grabbed me — a trend shared by many of my feeble attempts to pick up mobile games — and I haven’t returned to it since. Pikmin Bloom wouldn’t have even been on my radar if not for Emilia Rose of Epilogue, who posted about the game in our community Discord server. But, for whatever reason, I downloaded the game and added her as a friend, expecting to dabble with the game for an afternoon before promptly forgetting it was installed on my phone.
My first impressions with Pikmin Bloom were nothing special. The mechanics and presentation of the various menus are anchored in the same principles as Pokemon GO, where you walk around your city and amass a number of collectibles. Like Pokemon GO, Pikmin Bloom uses your GPS and encourages you to visit local hotspots that serve as larger scale interactivity points. Pikmin Bloom even has that “gotta catch ‘em all” feel when there are so many varieties of Pikmin and so many tasks that they can collectively perform. There was nothing fundamentally new here in Pikmin Bloom, leading me into a false sense that I’d become bored.
How Pikmin Bloom Seeded My Addiction
Almost immediately, however, Pikmin Bloom hooked me from the moment I sprouted and nicknamed my first Pikmin. I’ve always had a soft spot for the adorable, derpy designs of the various Pikmin species. In fact, when I belatedly purchased a Nintendo Switch, I assigned the Pikmin avatar to my profile — mostly because of the cuteness factor, not to mention my general lack of attachment to any core Nintendo properties. But it’s quite strange that I feel drawn to Pikmin, because my limited exposure to the original Pikmin on my friend’s Gamecube nearly 20 years ago left me with memories of anxiety and dread.
In the first Pikmin game, Captain Olimar’s lonely space voyage left him in dire straits of life-or-death, which meant that every day you weren’t efficiently gathering scattered resources with your Pikmin was a day lost, ratcheting up the sense that your impending death was inevitable. Furthermore, something about watching Pikmin die and get eaten by monstrous bugs during these spaceship recovery missions kind of traumatized me, as silly as that may sound. (I should also mention that we played Pikmin without a memory card, which amplified this tension even further.) Needless to say, I wasn’t used to games making me feel this internal neurotic pressure at the time, and I consequently never attempted to play any core entry in the Pikmin series.
I picked up Pikmin Bloom still carrying around some of this emotional baggage, expecting the game to involve similar moments of Pikmin battles and time-pressured spaceship repair. To my delight, however, Pikmin Bloom is about as carefree and lighthearted a game as any I’ve played.
The Charming Presentation of Pikmin Bloom
Playing Pikmin Bloom is a delight in its cheerful presentation. The bright aesthetic of the game is inviting and the interface is smooth. The music is synthy and ambient but also upbeat and energizing. The objective of Pikmin Bloom is as simple as growing and nurturing Pikmin of different types, expanding your little sentient seedling squad indefinitely. The blended activities in Pikmin Bloom are intuitive and varied enough to feel like it’s a game that’s perfect to pick up at any moment in my day, but it is never demanding or overbearing. Rather, the game lets me take things at my own pace, leaving me in a state where I feel in permanent abundance — as opposed to the commonplace feeling of scarcity that so many mobile games strive for.
I often need a narrative hook or compelling art style to grab me with games, but the microcosm of Pikmin Bloom’s feedback loops — however simple — tickle my brain in just the right way. For a number of reasons, I often don’t check my phone until the mid afternoon when I am winding down my exercise routine after work. By that time, I open up Pikmin Bloom and I have a few thousand steps under my belt, which the game immediately rewards me for. The most gratifying reward is seeing my steps boost a Pikmin sprout, allowing me to add the Pikmin to my group and nickname it. Then I check my daily expeditions in which my Pikmin have scoured the local community for new Pikmin seeds and various fruits that turn into nectar to feed the Pikmin as a treat.
Once I go through this initial feedback loop of harvesting and replanting Pikmin seeds, rewarding my hard-working troopers who brought back all the day’s loot, I usually discover a few new expeditions to send them on. Sometimes these expeditions take less than 10 minutes, while other times, they take several hours; this variation is partially what hooks my brain. I catch myself pausing what I’m doing every so often to reset the Pikmin, ensuring that I clear out all the day’s available expeditions before bed time. Not to mention, your bond with the Pikmin increases every time you interact with them in these ways. I find it inherently rewarding to make these little Pikmin happy, watching them emote and sprout colorful flowers.
In this daily routine, I usually level up once or twice along the way, as the early level challenges are rather easy to complete in a tutorial-like fashion. Each level is a mixture of taking a few thousand steps as well as completing an in-game task like simply growing an amount of Pikmin or harvesting flower petals from their dorky little antennae once you’ve fed them nectar. I never feel a need to play more than these little bursts of 10 minutes or fewer, so it feels like I still have a healthy balance with the game. That being said, I have never convinced myself to leave my house and go on a walk for a video game before — at least since the few hours I rode around with my friends during the initial Pokemon GO craze.
Planting Flowers and the Urge to Explore
Pikmin Bloom has a flower planting mechanic in which you spend your collected flower petals on a timer during a walk. Ostensibly, doing this earns you coins, but I have yet to reap any rewards for doing so. Despite my apparent ignorance of how this game mechanic functions, I enjoy seeing my daily routes covered in flowers when I look back on the day, so I continue doing it for the sheer aesthetic pleasure, if nothing else. But in order to spread flowers, you have to get up and walk.
Twice this week, I’ve laced up and set out around a few blocks of my neighborhood purely to enhance my Pikmin Bloom experience. I have to laugh at myself a bit because I know I’m doing something absurd, but I am enjoying this interruption of my daily routines thus far in my experience with the game. Maybe I’ll reconsider if I make the regrettable mistake of getting caught in a spontaneous rainstorm several miles down the road from my house.
It was a genuine bummer when I woke up one morning intending to put in some extra steps for Pikmin Bloom when a frigid nor’easter blew in with monsoon-like rain; I wanted nothing more than to stroll around and grow my Pikmin collection. Luckily, if I ever felt the itch to interact with my Pikmin, I could boot up the app and use the augmented reality camera function where you can watch them run around and snooze on your desk. Ultimately, I’d rather the weather clear up so I can get back to strolling around, planting flowers.
Is Pikmin Bloom A Gateway Drug for Mobile Games?
Like all mobile games, there’s an inherent risk that Pikmin Bloom will shutter up the initial in-game generosity and eventually expect you to spend money to continue advancing at a fun rate. To that effect, I’m dimly aware of how I’m being led down a path towards spending money in the game, if the aforementioned gold coin currency didn’t give it away. In Pikmin Bloom‘s shop, at least so far, there are storage upgrades and extra item duplicates that you can purchase if you first invest real-world money in exchange for the in-game coins. I feel like I play Pikmin Bloom just the right amount, however, to where I don’t think I’ll be tempted to make such an exchange. Especially when I consider what Nintendo’s other mobile forays have looked like in terms of predatory microtransactions, Pikmin Bloom‘s shop looks more like a tip jar.
Unlike so many mobile games before it, somehow these Pikmin were able to pull me into Bloom with their saucer-like eyes and startled little chirps. Again, I cannot overstate how shocking my affinity for Pikmin Bloom is, because another mobile game, NieR Reincarnation, released earlier this year and I haven’t even touched it. For the uninitiated, NieR: Automata is my favorite game of all time and I’d consider its recently remastered predecessor, NieR Replicant, my favorite 2021 release thus far, with Yoko Taro’s recent Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars as a close contender. Given my die-hard passion for the NieR series and its ilk, I don’t think anyone put “Flora gets obsessed with the mobile Pikmin game instead of NieR” on their 2021 bingo card.
Pikmin Bloom isn’t remotely in my consideration for game of the year, but it’s certainly one that has swept into my life unexpectedly and welcomingly. I don’t often play games of this kind, so the tiny pleasures still feel fresh to me. I haven’t yet decided if I plan on giving the mainline Pikmin games a try, but Pikmin Bloom has nurtured a soft spot that I didn’t realize was there before. My only hope is that Bloom starts rolling out some regular social events in the near future, because it’d be a blast to see my city absolutely covered in digital flowers.
I was half-heartedly determined to be an elitist snob whose only soft spot in mobile gaming was Florence, a masterpiece of non-verbal visual storytelling. But, alas, I admit that Pikmin Bloom taught me how I am equally susceptible to the charms of live service-style mobile games. I expect I’ll spend many more hours marching around my neighborhood, whistling my Pikmin along. And hopefully, my enthusiasm for Pikmin Bloom will bubble over into some of those games like NieR Reincarnation that I know I’d love and owe it to myself to finally play.
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