Find a way home through a sprawling ant-sized metropolis
Tinykin is a 2022 2½D Collect-a-Thon Platformer in the vein of Pikmin, developed by Splashteam and published by tinyBuild. It follows the adventures of Milodane as he crash lands on in a house populated by insects.
Tinykin provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adventurer Archaeologist: The backstory has Milodane traveling the stars with only Nevus to keep him company while seeking humanity's true origin.
- After the End: Humanity was shrunk by Ardwin and escaped to another planet, leaving Earth to the insects for multiple generations.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Challenge Update added alternate outfits for Milodane. Most are obtained by earning a pair of gold medals from races set in each level, with a final costume requiring platinum medals from every race in the game.
- Bait-and-Switch: Celerion Park opens with Walter about to just give you the Thingy you need to complete Ardwin's Device to keep you a satisfied customer, before the park starts falling apart and you're tasked with repairing it.
- Blessed with Suck: The shieldbugs can hear Ardwin's Canticle no matter where they go in the house. It might be the song of their god, but they never get a second of peace and quiet in their life.
- Buffy Speak: Ridmi knows what the components for Ardwin's Device are called... except for the Thingy.
- Chekhov's Gun: Milodane goes into his teleporter while still holding Nevus' toy bone and is shown playing with it as part is his idle animations. When Ardwin reveals a device to escape the house is impossible to build with 1991 technology, it turns out the bone is exactly what he needs to finish it.
- City in a Bottle: The ending reveals the house, and countless other areas are kept in jars under the watchful eyes of aliens.
- Cloudcuckoolander: The mantises are an entire species of cloudcuckoolanders. Their matriarch encourages this in Milodane, saying courage, even if it makes you look weird, is the key to finding the truth.
- Collect-a-Thon Platformer: In addition to the parts needed to build Ardwin's Device, each room in the house also contains three major collectables that are tracked in your objectives - Pollen (which grants you more bubble charges), Tinykin, and Artefacts for Prattle's Museum. There's also four letters in every room except in Transidor, and collecting each letter gives you more Pollen.
- Cosmic Horror Reveal: The ending nonchalantly shows the house, and countless other areas are kept trapped by aliens. Milodane gets a glimpse of them while escaping.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: As a dung beetle in Foliana warns that no matter how bizarre the mantis' belief system may sound, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
- Cypher Language: The alien language used in the probe is one. It's effectively a security report on Milodane, calling for his immediate removal.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dying has literally no consequences. You don't lose Tinykin, and you just respawn on the last safe platform you were on.
- Driving Question: From the start, one of the main mysteries is finding out how and why Milodane was shrunk. Humanity as a whole turns out to have been shrunk by Ardwin, but rather than being a recent change, it happened so long ago that humanity forgot what Earth's actual size is supposed to be.
- Evolving Title Screen: Finding different types of Tinykin will add them to the title screen.
- Fall Damage: Bizarrely, 'dying' from fall damage is often beneficial. Not only is no progress lost, but the respawn mechanics mean there's no need to climb back to the platform you fell from. If you do need to get to a distant floor, activating the bubble glider resets your fall distance.
- Fantastic Caste System: A loose one exists, with dung beetles falling on the bottom. Most live in Balnea, out of sight, out of mind of the rest of the house.
- Foreshadowing:
- Your first introduction to the mantises of Foliana consists of them being paranoid of "shadows in the walls". Weird, but a dung beetle there warns you that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
- Eagle-eyed players might even see mysterious eyeballs watching them from sources like masks and binoculars. You see exactly what they are in the ending.
- Some of the ants you can meet are discontent about their working conditions. By the time you reach Ambrose, there's a full on worker revolution in progress.
- Two shieldbugs journey for the source of Ardwin's Canticle, and hear it most loudly in Celerion, an upstairs level. Sure enough, the actual source is in the attic.
- Fratbro: The silverfish are an entire species of fratbros, to the point of their parties lasting days.
- Gameplay and Story Integration:
- You immediately lose the first red Tinykin you find, since it explodes in its introductory cutscene.
- It's impossible to only recruit one green Tinykin for the first time. If you hatch one of their eggs, the eggs around it will also hatch to ensure you have enough for their cutscene.
- A God I Am Not: Ardwin certainly isn't encouraging the insects of the house to worship him.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The house seems to be in one at the year 1991, with seeds and resources reappearing regularly to the point that the insects in the house depend on it.
- Hair-Trigger Explosive: Anytime a red Tinykin gets excited, its fuse will light. This can include bumping into them, or just picking one up.
- Have You Seen My God?: Many of the bugs doubt Ardwin's existence, since they've never actually seen the guy.
- The Hermit: Ardwin flat out avoids the insects in the house, only listening to his song on the boombox.
- Hub Level: Chrysal Workshop, which unlocks an entrance to each room you finish. Transidor Crossing is a downplayed example, explicitly used in-universe for travel and is used to enter three levels.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: Or insect eyes. Prattle can only speculate on the meaning of some of their artifacts, and some insects take Ardwin's research samples to be trophies made from his enemies.
- Idiot Hair: Milo has a cowlick in his hair. One idle animation has him mess with his hair to press it down, only for it to spring right back up, to his annoyance.
- Lost Common Knowledge: Humanity lives on a planet named Aegis. The story begins when Milodane sets out to prove his theory that humanity originated from a different planet, Earth.
- Meaningful Name: Every name in the game is a reference to something, whether that be pop-culture, a relation to the character's circumstances, or just a simple Author Avatar.
- Medium Awareness: Celerion Park has two mantises that are discussing shapes, when one of them suddenly asks to see the other's back. They both quickly panic upon realizing that they're actually just flat 2D sprites meant to always face the camera in a 3D world.
- Mouse World: The insects inside The House live in a human-like society that crafted entire metropolises with man-made objects like cardboard, books, and soda cans including a theme park, several hotels, several restaurants, farmland, mail service, and a church. The humans themselves do not appear, and you find out later that the only human in the house, Ardwin, is also the size of an insect after he invented technology to shrink people to insect size with no way to change back.
- My Greatest Failure: Ardwin is despondent over accidentially wiping out humanity. He's overjoyed when Milodane reveals humanity managed to escape to another planet.
- No Antagonist: There are no enemies standing in the way of Milodane's quest for knowledge, and the only dangers come from the environment.
- Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Among the things Ardwin developed are a technology to shrink people to insect size, implants to keep him alive long past a normal human lifespan, and a device to escape the aliens' City in a Bottle.
- Once an Episode: Each of the five main levels has a few repeating elements:
- Lost letters that need to be delivered to a post box.
- A ghost ant named Ghasper who tries to scare you.
- A thief who asks you to recover a precious gem in exchange for an artifact.
- A pair of shieldbugs looking for the source of Ardwin's Canticle.
- Sikaru looking to make a new brew.
- A series of candles smothered in silk that can be broken for 50 pollen.
- Powerful and Helpless: Ardwin is nothing short of a genius, and knows exactly how to escape from the house. He's as trapped as Milodane because the necessary technology simply doesn't exist.
- Robot Dog: Nevus, Milodane's assistant.
- Scavenged Punk: Everything that the insects in The House have used to make their society in the various rooms is constructed from whatever man-made objects happened to be laying around. The Waters Of Balnea, for example, contains skyscrapers made out of toilet paper rolls, with candles and lit matches used as streetlamps.
- Shout-Out:
- There's a dung beetle-silverfish couple named Jack and Rose. He will ask you to give her a charcoal portrait he made of her, while she will ask you to bring him a large wooden board. After you complete both, they will give Milodane a ring as a thank you for reuniting them.
- There's a restaurant in the silverfish half of the bathroom area called the Squishy Crab, run by McCrabs, Rob, and Squiddo, and being threatened by another bug named Tonplank.
- The upper floor has a small hospital where an ant named Haus is diagnosing a patient, Addler, in front of his nurses Forgot and Cameround. He also insists that it's NEVER Lupus.
- The bar in Celerion Park has two wasps named Hiro and Zucco, with the former encouraging the latter to try some jasmine tea because the latter is complaining about losing his "honor" by being banished from the Red Team.
- So Okay, It's Average: In-universe, the nectar brewed from Transidor (the foyer) is stated to be completely unremarkable and forgettable, likely since no insects settle there.
- Speaking Simlish: Whenever one of the insects talks, a series of synthesized sounds accompanies their dialogue box. The only characters whose speech matches their text are Milodane in the opening narration and Ardwin, the only other actual human.
- Species Title: The game is named after the small creatures that follow Milodane.
- Super Drowning Skills: Justified, Milodane's suit has a lot of advanced technology that isn't waterproof.
- Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Nevus' toy bone holds enough energy to power an entire 1991 city.
- Super-Strength: Purple Tinykin are the heavy lifters, and their introductory cutscene shows a single one catching a falling book.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Non-monster example. The ending implies Milodane was never shrunk; humanity as a whole just never restored themselves from Ardwin's shrinking device, and gradually forgot they were originally bigger.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Nearly every bug in the house loves Doomiz. Probably their worst nightmare is running out of Doomiz and nectar, forcing them to drink water.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: There's nothing stopping you from going to any NPC and jumping on them, running them over with your soapboard, or throwing your Tinykin at them. You even get an Achievement titled "But... why?" for harming The House's inhabitants 100 times!
- Wicked Wasps: The wasps in Celerion Park are universally prideful and curt.
- You Can See Me?: An ant named Ghasper tries to scare Milodane in each room, only realizing at the end that you can also see him.
