Here’s a tip to make “Gotta Catch ’em All!” easier
As a 3D platformer fan who loves scooping up collectibles, Tinykin is such a breezy time.
Playing as a shrunken explorer in a gigantic bedroom with insect citizens just living their lives, you’re constantly on the lookout for glowing bits of pollen to collect and new (Pikmin-like) tinykin creatures to command. For folks like me, it feels like a continuous brain massage. The game’s sense of progression is so fast, you’re usually just seconds away from finding something to pick up. It maintains this pace the whole way through its six-hour run. That is until you start nudging your way toward 100 percent completion.
Without spoiling anything, Tinykin has two main collectibles — pollen and tinykin — and there isn’t a radar or ability to help sniff them out. You’ve got to scope out every inch of every room from every conceivable angle; this stuff can be really tucked out of view.
If you’re playing casually, you shouldn’t run into progression-blocking bumps in the road. It’s pretty much go-go-go all the way through, without the need to hunt obsessively.
But if you’re after the “Gotta Catch ’em All!” trophy or achievement for finding every tinykin, you’ll need to put on your explorer’s cap and get to work. It took me 10 hours to do it all, and one bit of community info saved me a lot of trouble in the home stretch.
It’s best to get all of the pollen first
On the pollen front, YouTuber WheatYT has a playlist of full-level playthroughs.
So if you’re just missing a handful of pick-ups, and you swear you’ve looked absolutely everywhere, some of these fast-forwarded guide videos can do the trick.
My real concern was finding every tinykin. This is trickier — unlike pollen, which has a known total for each level, there isn’t a tracker for tinykin you’re missing. As such, the “Gotta Catch ’em All!” trophy and achievement can be nerve-wracking. It was my last one.
**Spoilers below**
There are six main zones in Tinykin, and the idea of going back through them all again — not knowing which ones I’d already fully finished, and which ones were still incomplete — was less than ideal. Thankfully, some players have numbers for us to work off of.
You can’t see how many tinykin you’re missing, but you can see how many tinykin you’ve currently got (in the pause menu). Pink, green, and yellow tinykin will stick with you, but red and blue tinykin complicate things — they are “used up” in puzzle-solving.
How to figure out which tinykin you’re missing
After you’ve finished the story and you’ve done everything except the “Gotta Catch ’em All!” challenge, you can reference these tinykin “final totals” from ItsGamer FURY and AusFinalBoss on TrueAchievements to see which levels still have tinykin to find:
- Transidor Crossing — 30 pink, 8 red, 25 green, 12 blue
- City of Sanctar — 41 pink, 22 red
- Foliana Heights — 26 pink, 17 red, 30 green
- Waters of Balnea — 40 pink, 24 red, 22 green, 37 blue
- Lands of Ambrose — 42 pink, 22 red, 20 green, 10 blue, 86 yellow
- Celerion Park — 42 pink, 8 red, 30 green, 21 blue, 60 yellow
- The Last Refuge — 0 (4 red used to progress the story)
If you’ve done everything in a given level, your red tinykin total should perfectly match these numbers — there are finite obstacles to explode with the little fellas. So if you’ve “used up” every red tinykin you possibly can, you’ll be left with the numbers shown above.
Blue tinykin are used to form chains of electricity, and since there’s wiggle room to be less than perfectly efficient when forming a stretched-out line, you may use more — or less — tinykin than other players. That said, the blue tinykin you’ve “used” will be exactly where you left them in the level, so you can look at your pause menu total, then manually tally up the rest of them that are out in the world all electrified and stationary.
If your pause menu figures are different, then you should search that specific level.
Thankfully, I was thorough with the little blue guys. I was missing three red tinykin in Celerion Park, and ended up finding them before too long thanks to this info.
It would be nice to see Splashteam patch in a tinykin tracker, so players know precisely which levels to revisit, but if that never happens, at least there’s a way to math things out.
