What is the soul of a game?

Published on 08/30/2024, 1311 words, 5 minutes to read

A video essay about Pikmin

Pikmin 2 Caveless Edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FEry0Gv_dA

Script

What is the soul of a game?

Okay, that's pretentious. Let me start over.

[Intro goes here]

I'm gonna start by saying that I'm not a game designer. I've never really made a game besides some experiments and tools. But, I've played my share of games and talked with people that work in the industry. I think I know enough about what I like to be able to explain what I like and why I like it. I totally admit that I'm really ignorant here though.

Games are a bunch of interconnected systems that let players explore and interact with virtual worlds. These systems and their interactions are how you get The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild's systemic open world perfection, Super Metroid's insane mechanical depth, or divine objects like Metal Gear Rising: Revengance.

What happens when you start peeling aspects back? When do you remove so much from a game that it ceases to be the same game? How do you find that one unique part of a game?

This isn't something I really thought about until I played the mod Pikmin 2: Caveless edition.

Pikmin 2

Just as a refresher, Pikmin 2 is a real-time strategy puzzle roguelite metroidvania that has you commanding swarms of little units named Pikmin. You use these pikmin to battle enemies, carry supplies to the onion to raise more, and gather treasure so you can repay your employer's debts. This is one of my favourite games of all time. It's the game I go back to when I want to chill out and have a good time. I've put hundreds of hours into it over the years and have considered learning the any% speedrun route.

One of the biggest differences between Pikmin and Pikmin 2 are the caves. The caves are the roguelite part of the game. Spelunking into them puts you at the mercy of the random number generator as you find treasure, beat enemies, and gather upgrades to your adventure kit. These caves are the single biggest departure from the first game. A huge percentage of your playtime is spent in these caves searching for treasure.

These caves also contain bosses that conceal upgrades to your adventure kit, making the reward more than worth the risk. One of the hardest caves in the game gives you the ability to pluck a swarm of pikmin with just your whistle.

So, what happens when you remove the caves?

Pikmin 2: Caveless Edition

Last year Bugabread released the mod Pikmin 2 Caveless edition. As the name implies, they entirely removed caves from the game. All the treasure you need to beat the game is now found scattered through the game maps. One of the biggest changes is that white pikmin are just found in the overworld instead of hidden in the caves. This means you can just grow more white pikmin instead of having to hoard them like precious resources.

In exchange, Caveless just feels so...hollow now. It normally takes me a day or so to beat Pikmin 2, but I was able to beat caveless edition in an hour and a half on an airplane. Full completion only took me an hour longer. All of the cool bosses from the base game are gone save the ones that could reasonably work on the overworld.

The Gamecube only has 24 MB of memory, and a lot of the flair and detail of the overworld ends up eating a lot of that memory. This leaves very little room for the cool bosses and enemies you can find in the caves. Especially when you add in features like the white onion.

Overall, it makes Pikmin 2 feel a lot more like a direct rehash of the first game, just with you collecting treasure instead of ship parts.

The soul of a game

Playing through Caveless a few times really showed me what the soul of Pikmin 2 is: the caves. The caves do a lot to balance out the difficulty of the game. Some of the later caves are downright sadistic and I end up appreciating the challenge.

One of the biggest examples of how Caveless feels...off is how easy it is to get the most powerful upgrade in the game: the pluckaphone. In Pikmin 2, you only get the pluckaphone after beating the hardest cave in the game: the submerged castle. You go in with only blue pikmin and your wits, and you need to race against time or the cave boss will just pop up and wreck you. It instantly flips Pikmin 2 on its head and makes it a light horror game. You earn the pluckaphone in Pikmin 2.

In Caveless, you can pick it up on the second day because it's just laid out in the open for free. You can just start a game, get past the first day, and grab the most powerful upgrade like it's nothing. It makes a lot of the rest of the game trivial and ends up hiding some of the work that Bugabread put into the game. I didn't know they implemented an auto-pluck feature until someone mentioned it in a YouTube video. I didn't need it because I was using the pluckaphone.

There is challenge to be had here, but it's a completely different kind than what you get in the base game. In the process of stripping back all of the caves, Caveless actually ends up being a brilliant speed game. I could see myself going back to play it purely as a way to challenge myself to make the most optimized routing possible. This does mean that Caveless is more aligned towards dandori-style planning like the later games.

I guess the main reason I feel so strongly about this mod is that the lack of caves really underscores their importance to me. If someone modded caves into the game, it would be seen as a genre-defining stroke of genius. Pikmin is all about detailed planning, and the caves add reactive strategy into the mix. The overworld has you plan out your actions in advance, but you're on the edge of your seat in the caves.

Conclusion

Now to be clear, I'm not trying to put down Bugabread for the work they put into Caveless. There is a lot of care, love, design, and tweaking that went into making it happen. They really did go out of their way to make it great. It's just really shown me what the soul of Pikmin 2 is: the caves. Caveless just leaves me with really interesting thoughts about what I really like about games and inspires me to see what happens when things are peeled back so far.

Caveless edition really is a fantastic mod and I really suggest that you check it out if you want to. The link to the mod is in the description. It's genuinely an interesting take on what Pikmin 2 could be and it's well worth playing, even if it's a bit of a short play.

I hope you enjoyed my take on Pikmin 2 Caveless edition. I've finally hit stride with my production process and I hope to get a few more of these kinds of videos out this year. Before I let you go, I want to take some time to thank my patrons on the screen. If you want to support me, head to my Patreon. The link is in the description.

Other than that, have a good day, stay hydrated, and be good to yourself. It's been rough for us all out there and if you can make someone else's day better, please go ahead and do it. Stay frosty y'all.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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