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Legend has it that the Pikmin series began life as its creator's response to starting a garden. In truth, though, it feels more like his response to starting a family. This is a game built of empathy and responsibility - a game about exploring a familiar world from an unfamiliar, childlike vantage point, and about trying to ensure that the equally childlike characters who assist you on the journey come to no harm along the way.Pikmin's concerned with being a kid, then, but it's also concerned with being a parent. The colours are bright and the music's chirpy, yet when the hour grows late and your precious charges are far from home, the whole thing reveals itself as a dark fantasy of stress; of fretful absences and setting suns and of a seemingly breezy world that, upon closer inspection, is teeming with brisk malice.
A child's perspective and a parent's anxiety: previous Pikmin games have played with this tension, and you could argue over whether either quite mastered its balance. The first Pikmin had a strict time limit that gave Captain Olimar just 30 days to reclaim the scattered parts of his crashed spaceship with the assistance of those helpful vegetable people and their selection of special skills. The ensuing adventure was a game that you could play for seven hours straight and then lose.
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