Pikuniku

Pikuniku looks like a children's cartoon and is, by a noticeable margin, not one. You wake up at the bottom of a cave as a long-legged red blob with no memory of why anyone wanted you buried, climb out into a cheerful pastel kingdom, and slowly realise that the smiling man on every poster is extracting everything of value from the population in exchange for free cosmetic gifts.

Moment to moment the game is a soft physics platformer — you roll, jump, stretch your legs out to grapple, and kick things until they either pay off a puzzle or roll into a goal. Set pieces include a basketball tournament, a tiny robot uprising, a dance-off and several escapes, none of which overstay their welcome. The main campaign runs four to five hours; almost every screen has a sight gag or a one-line joke layered over the geometry.

Developed by the French studio Sectordub and published by Devolver Digital, Pikuniku leans on pacing and writing more than on mechanical depth, which gives it room to slip pointed jokes about authoritarianism between the silliness. A separate local cooperative mode adds custom two-player puzzles built around timing and shared inertia, with challenges that don't appear in the solo campaign.