Collection essentials #236: Pikiinya! (SNES)

Here we have another falling-blocks puzzle game, something that was in nice abundance on the console. And Pikiinya nails the art of changing things up just a little bit in a way that makes it totally unique and awesome.

In Pikiinya, every piece that falls consists of four blocks. A given block can either be (generally speaking) a penguin, an ice block, or a penguin frozen in an ice block. Ice blocks and penguins have to be cleared differently. Penguins will disappear if you manage to get a string of six of them connected in any sequence (just not diagonally), but frozen penguins don’t count. Ice will break when you get a full row of it, much like in Tetris. As you can imagine, breaking a row of ice will free any frozen penguins inside, which can lead to combos.

The basic modes you’d expect are here, such as the single-player score attack mode, the story mode where you play against the computer, and two-player versus. There’s also a “stage clear” mode where you have to eliminate these things that appear to be beating hearts, by clearing a penguin adjacent to them, and there are many pre-designed stages to get through. There’s also a strange “race” mode that I don’t think I fully understand, but it seems to involve getting clears at a consistent rate and not “going cold” for too long.

As an adult, I really treasure my beauty sleep and going to bed on time. I’m not the one that tends to stay up late in order to play video games. However, when I dove head-first into Pikiinya, I got so hooked that I stayed up a couple hours because I just couldn’t stop playing!! There are very few games that can make me do that.

This is a great example of why people like me delve into the world of Japanese video games, because there are so many cool ones you’ll totally miss out on if you don’t. Pikiinya is a total delight and a shining essential from overseas.