Everybody loves a little guy and they especially love throwing or ordering them around. Games are no strangers to little guys and we’ve got lots of examples.
Pikmin:
These are like the quintessential little guys. They do everything little guys should do like making little noises and dying for your goals
Now I haven’t played this one cause I don’t really do rhythm games, but they are excellent little guys. Singing isn’t a crucial part of being a little guy, but most of the best ones will do it
That’s just a short list of examples I thought up, but what games about little guys are your favorites? Who are your favorite little guys whether they’re from a game about little guys or not?
there were a couple of knock offs released in the wake of lemmings
the humans, which i think even got a sequel, was about early humans co-operating to do early human stuff. also it had some nice promo art in that kind of late 80s/early 90s whimsical upper middle class newspaper cartoon kinda style
the troddlers was on the snes, and i think uk magazines were generally positive about it, and i know pretty much nothing else about it. the boxart looks like an 80s toyline for very young children though
and two were on the ds. ecolis has you playing as a big orange thing that goes around giving orders to squirrels to protect the environment or something
Overlord
Fun game. Clearly mechanically inspired by Pikmin, setting and tone heavily pulling from Shrek and other twisted-fairy-tales things with a dollop of 00’s Edge (acquired taste I suppose but I had fun with it).
The tokobots are pretty good little guys. It’s a neat little game, but I felt it gets really frustrating towards the latter half which soured it a lot. Really the best thing about this game is the little guys
I remember stumbling upon Dap in a random charity bundle some years back, it’s basically a moody indie adventure game that lifted liberally from the whole Pikmin “corral a bunch of folks to get stuff done” deal. I either tried a demo or played the first hour or so of it, seemed like it could be something.
Even though it’s a much different style of game than the other games listed here (although there are some interesting parallels, such as using indirect controls) I think Dwarf Fortress is very much a game about a bunch of little guys.
Perhaps adjacent but there’s something very British about zoomed out action games where you wreck havoc in a tiny city. At my work we have the rights for Judge Dredd and I’d love to make a game like this!
