The Pikmin 4 Demo Is Bigger Than You Think

Nintendo has released a public demo for Pikmin 4, and there’s a lot more to it than you may think.

We will avoid getting into story spoilers here. But as you may have already gotten used to, Nintendo usually uses the first level to introduce the mechanics and rules of their games. Pikmin 4 is very similar in this regard to Pikmin 3, but it is narratively tighter.

We will now get into the weeds of some of those game mechanics, so if you prefer not to get spoiled on those details, this is your spoiler warning.

The big difference here that will be obvious from the start is the addition of Rescue Pups. While Nintendo’s idea of making not-quite dog pups is intended to make it fit in with Pikmin’s strange world of fauna, it can actually be jarring to hear the Furby like things bark.

But the idea of Rescue Pups is intuitive enough. They will follow your orders on command, and they can sniff out the people you intend to rescue. They functionally get some of the radar functions you usually have to access in some other way.

Rescue Pups can also carry items that can be carried by as many as three Pikmin, but you’ll want to keep them close by you as much as possible because they serve so many important functions.

Another interesting ability Rescue Pups have is their ability to break pots. Now, this seems to be the Pikmin Rush ability transferred over from the Pikmin to your Rescue Pup. It doesn’t look like Pikmin Rush exists anymore, at least at the start of the game.

Lastly, you can send your Rescue Pup to fight, but they aren’t invincible. Trying out the demo, we weren’t able to make our Rescue Pup lose all their health, but it will probably either end in a lose state, (you start the day over? Probably not the whole game) or the pup faints and you can’t use them for a certain period of time (possibly not until the next day.)

The demo will also introduce you to Ice Pikmin early, but we’ll leave it to you to discover its ability.

As for the demo itself, you can theoretically play it indefinitely, for as long as you want. The demo ends when you collect 1500 Sparklium. I won’t explain what that is here, but if you don’t collect Sparklium, you can just keep playing and playing. You can carry your progress over from the demo to the full game when it launches, so this effectively is a license to play it for the next two weeks for as much as you want.

Pikmin 4 will be releasing exclusively on the Nintendo Switch on July 21, 2023. You can watch IGN’s coverage of the first level of this game below.