Pikmin Bloom is great, which is saying something because the entire mobile game industry is horrible.

Mobile games are treated as commodities instead of creative products, like how Atari viewed their games in the 1980’s. The billions of dollars mobile games bring in are dirty money, worsening corporate greed and encouraging exploitation of the poor and downtrodden, especially those that struggle with addictive behaviors. Arguably, mobile games never even had much potential in the first place. Before Candy Crush Saga ruined everything, they tried to mimic PC and console games, with anemic results. There’s just not much you can do with just a touch screen, no buttons, and not even a Nintendo DS stylus to get around how fat and imprecise fingers are. Putting a virtual d-pad and buttons on the screen just means your fingers are always covering the action, while packing a bluetooth controller just causes a smartphone to take a good hit to its portability, its main selling point. Even the best of mobile Sonic the Hedgehog remasters is vastly improved with an actual controller or a port to Steam. To this day, mobile games are defined solely by their limitations, like FMV games were back in the 16-bit era. The mobile industry is basically a dumping ground for the kind of trash that used to infest the Playstation and Game Boy Advance, and what’s worse, its toxins have been trying to seep into handheld and console games to make them worse with glitchy patch-it-out-later launches, microtransactions, and always-online live service business models.

If you want to make worthwhile mobile games, you need to stop thinking of them as games. Chances are you’ll only get something as shallow as your average Atari 2600 game that way. It’s better to step outside the box and think of them as toys. And that is why I love Pikmin Bloom. It’s not a game; it’s a digital toy that encourages you to get outside and brighten up your life.