Piko Piko Reviews

buggy, easy, development hell. quirky-cute, casual, but still engaging. if you expect more than what the store page shows, you'll be disappointed. i got enough out of it. pick it up on sale i guess, whatever.

Very cute, cool and fun platformer. Hopefully the tank keyboard only glitch will be fixed soon

I've played many other similar waifu metroidvanias but this is the one that left an impact on me with fun map layouts, sudden secret dungeons, and nonsensical but funny characters. A certain other waifu metroidvania I've played tries to sometimes convey emotional dialogue with broken english, but Piko Piko is just written silly, with silly english so it's funny. 😄 *Update, I've seen the artist for the game posting updates for Piko Piko on their twitter feed. Perhaps it is being updated, or a sequel is being made? Their sneak peak looks great.

The review was initially positive and I played it a lot during early access, but has since been changed. The full release of the game is THE EXACT SAME as the version I played back in August of 2019, with the same softlocks and issues that have existed since v0.06 including new ones (e.g they LITERALLY patched out the ability to die, your HP cannot fall below 1). My initial review praised the developer for trying to fix things, and at this point I can't say that without lying through my teeth. Not to mention the developer started working on Piko Piko 2 back in 2020, 2 years before the actual full release of Piko Piko 1. For the last 2 years, they only showed progress updates on Piko Piko 2, not their game that was still in EA on Steam. They literally abandoned this game because it was "too much spaghetti to do more", a quote from an actual conversation I had with them. This game is made in Construct 2, an engine that uses block coding and has plenty of features for organization (e.g groups), and the ability to name objects. Any look into this game's files shows that they literally stopped naming objects, with cleverly named "Sprite 58" and "Sprite 67" being very good indicators of that. Not just a one-time thing, they consistently made the mess worse and worse. Their practices are just scummy especially since the price of this game spiked tremendously for the full release despite the final product being objectively worse than the early access product. I cannot recommend supporting this developer in the future and I'm sure their next game will unfortunately meet the same fate as this one.

Maybe I somehow broke the game? maybe it really is a glitchy mess? suffice to say I beat an enemy that looked like an intentional glitch type fun enemy which wouldn't progress the conversation no matter how many times I pressed any button, it just had 0100110 and on rare occasion actual lines if I were lucky to get any, in the end I managed it and something about getting a light? and thank you hope you enjoyed the show, now on the top of the screen are green numbers permanently, I can't progress anywhere because the place to go isn't attached to anything despite me searching everywhere dood. If I have a unique item or function unlocked from everything I've beaten so far I'd love to see them because the game basically just tells you nothing, no item descriptions, shop menu's are broken at that now that I mention it, the game was fine at first but slowly degraded into a mess as though something horribly went wrong in it's own data, it doesn't tell you ho to slide which at times you need to and despite having a move list which you'd like to assume tells you all you need to know, not only some of it dood. The thing is the game itself? it's fun, decently fun, I was looking forward to it's complete form but this? this is not it, this is someone's idea of a bad joke, will I give the dev the benefit of the doubt to fix this? yes because I do like this game, I want it to do well but as it stands, I don't understand how people have beaten the game, assuming anyone truly actually has so I'll have to wait and hope into the distant future it seems dood.

The game looks gorgeous and is filled to the brim with the essence of cuteness. Unfortunately, "Piko-Piko" is really buggy, has multiple design flaws (for example, having to restart a level after falling into a pit instead of respawning with decreased health), and provides sloppy controls.

This game is a rough gem, the character Animation, Music and Character controls are all of high quality, the characters are pretty adorable waifus material, and it's a party time if you like Anime references, The level design had been improved in the full release and the some of the more unfair bosses where nerfed to a more proper difficulty curve, more areas, enemies and powers where also added in the full released, and it's a massive improvement over the beta version, the game does not feature much of a story and it seems just an excuse for different game play scenarios as it's a light hearted comedy. overall this is a good game despite it's flaws and i'm sure the sequel will be a massive improvement as the developer gets more experience and improve his own workflow and avoid the same pitfalls. also that intro OST is stuck in my head and it won't go away. also Nyan best waifu

While the game has potential and has really good pixel art, the controls are a mess, and the game is quite buggy. Also, I had some difficulty figuring out what each upgrade does since there are no explanations. I'd like to be able to recommend it, but the game's last update was over 6 months ago, so I'm not sure the game will ever be finished. EDIT: Since the game has been released officially I decided to play it some more, but it's current state is still broken. I experienced many bugs, including 2 that made it impossible for me to continue playing, one in my old file, where I got stuck in a region since my power ups didn't work as intended, and the other one in my new file, where the game broke after the elevator cutscene. Besides that, the stores seem to not work correctly, and I don't think the first option in the menu when you select a file should be to Delete it. The game still feels unfinished and sadly cannot be recommended as a full product.

im not the type of person to write reviews for this game, but this game is actually so buggy and very seemingly unfinished that I feel the need the warn people about this. as other people are mentioning, getting an item does not tell you what you just got. if you pause, there is a page you can go to which shows you a bunch of controls, including for power ups you do not have yet. however, not even every upgrade is on this menu. at one point i got an upgrade that gave me a slide attack which was not on the list. im pretty sure this slide attack was bugged out though, because every other time i used it, it would make my character spin around swinging their hammer. this is an example of the many issues this game has. i'm not even sure if the game is complete-able with how many bugs it has. at one point i beat a boss, and the boss just froze in their defeat animation, and i could push them around while they were stuck like this. im pretty sure i was supposed to be able to talk to the boss after. also, something i feel the need to mention, is the fact that your ground pound attack actually gives you vertical height when you use it. this felt necessary to platform through certain sections. as in, i would not have been able to move forward at certain points at all. i would have even soft locked my game at one point had this ability not been available. however, i am pretty sure i sequence broke the game and started accessing areas i was not supposed to be able to go by doing this. i really have no idea if this is a design over sight or an intended thing. i could keep talking about random issues the game has, but i dont feel like i need to. the art for this game is great, and even the game play had a lot of potential. but the game is very very very buggy, and seemingly too unfinished to be worth buying.

Let me be honest, I actually liked this game quite a lot, and I hate having to write a negative review. The characters are funny, the dialogues hilariously demented, the pixel art is adorable and the metroidvania structure decent enough. So why the thumb down? Well, for starters, there's some very odd design decisions here. You get a very basic tutorial, but no explanation about any of the power-ups you collect, so you have to figure them out yourself, and not all of them are exactly obvious. I also can't understand what the dev was thinking with that "Lv50" achievement, when the game can be very easily finished around lv. 10-15 (see my playtime? Around 8 hours came just from grinding this cheevo). But the real reason I can't recommend the game is that even after years of early access it's still absurdly buggy. I'm talking Sonic 06-level of broken, if not just one unmoving truck away from Big Rigs. What's worse is that many of these bugs can actually break the game or save file, sometimes permanently. Just off the top of my head, here's a showcase: - Got stuck into a wall and had to close the game. Multiple times. - Some save statues don't save your game. - After dying or loading a file, you start with a fixed 100Hp instead of full health - [b]The tank in the underground section doesn't respond to controller input, you can only move it with you keyboard[/b] - [b]The arcade minigame flat out deleted my fluffy friend Nyan. Permanently. She's cute and I missed her, so there goes my progress, had to restart the entire game.[/b] - The same minigame appears to be literally unplayable, meaning [strike][b]legit 100% completion is currently not possible[/b][/strike]. [b]SMALL UPDATE (28/07/2023)[/b]: Following various reports, I came back and verified that the Cookibius achievement is in fact obtainable (the requirement is just getting 1000 points); however, the minigame itself is still broken and the entire process essentially boils down to moving around while trying to collect INVISIBLE items and avoiding INVISIBLE enemies. - [b]An optional boss (the robot) instantly softlocks the game and cannot be fought[/b]. - Another boss (the witch) spawns infinite chests on defeat. This is maybe the only GOOD bug, and pretty much the only way to grind to level 50 without losing your sanity or sacrificing your soul to Nyarko. - Many prompts don't work as intended. For example at one point you have to sit on a bench to progress, but using UP or action doesn't work (in spite of the onscreen instruction), you have to JUMP on it instead. Sometimes you enter a door and a dialogue window briefly appears, while other times you CAN'T start the dialogue at all (I'll never be able to sleep not knowing what lies in that orange bush). And so on and so on. A lot of these bugs actually made me think I got stuck, so at one point I started keeping backup saves, but that's something you should only do to [strike]cheese achievements[/strike] transfer saves, not to finish a cute casual game about a hammer loli. I shouldn't have to fear for my save each time I enter a new area. Again, overall I LIKE the game, being a fan both of 2d exploration platformers and cute things, but in good conscience I can't recommend it, especially with the fairly high price tag. Should a patch fix at least the most serious issues, I might update this review, but until then, sorry Piko, but someone has to work on their programming.