Walking with Pikmin Bloom

    This new walking app from Niantic, the company that brought you Pokemon Go, and Nintendo, features new, adorable incentives for walking, a daily activity and emotion log, as well as some cute in-world bonuses.

    My daughter personally is in love with the little characters and their variations as well as their various accessories.

    When you start the game, you get a couple of Pikmin who only take about ten steps to grow into a fully formed little red dudes. These dudes will follow you around and bring you fruit. When you collect the fruit, you get nectar. When you feed them nectar, the flowers on their heads grow. Once the flowers are blooming, they will produce petals. Collect these petals when the Pikmin's flower is shining and then use those petals to plant flowers while you walk around in the real world.

    While PokemonGo requires walking a number of kilometers to hatch pokemon, in Pikmin you will grow new Pikmin for certain number of steps. The primary colors only require 1,000 steps each and as you level up, you encounter more variations that require more steps but produce more interesting pikmin.

    Poke gyms and poke stops are replaced in many cases by large flowers, which took me about a week to figure out. It turns out, to make the flowers bloom, you have to plant a certain number of blossoms near their base. It seems like the blossoms of the color planted most near that specific flower will be the color of that flower when it blooms. The blooming flower will on occasion create a large piece of fruit that will give a bunch of nectar of the corresponding color. You have to send your Pikmin out on an expedition to retrieve the large piece of fruit, but they grow in love when they return. When they have four filled hearts, they might ask to go grab a present and return with some kind of accessory.

    You will get Expedition options on a regular basis in which you can send your pikmin out to pick up something and bring it back to you. These things are usually large pieces of fruit for other Pikmin seedlings. A large, white 10,000 step seedling will give a Pikmin and some sort of accoutrement like a sticker or costume. The costumes are based on where the Pikmin seedling was picked up. For instance, if the seedling was picked up in a forest, the accessory might be a hat made from an acorn.

    The one thing about the game that I absolutely do not like other than how much it drains my phone battery is the money system. To get a single piece of gold, you must plant 500 flowers in game. For me, this means walking for between 20 and 30 minutes. The prices in the shop are similar to prices in the Pokemon Go shop, where one of your creatures staying in a gym for ten minutes earns a piece of gold. 

    If you're in an area with a medium to low rate of gym turnover in Pokemon Go, you can easily make enough coins to buy raid passes and participate in a lot of extra activities in a very enjoyable way. Unfortunately in Pikmin Bloom, making money takes so much time and effort, so many petals made from so much nectar and so much walking, that it doesn't really work the same way.

    While I will continue growing my Pikmin and seeing what weird accessories they pull up, I will not be spending any money on this game. In my opinion, if you're so greedy for money that you have to make the in-game currency practically impossible to accrue enough of to matter, you don't deserve any real-world money from me. Still a fun way to walk, though.