I have been playing Pikmin Bloom for a little over a week and a half now and wanted to give my thoughts. Pikmin Bloom is a new game on both Google Play & iOS from Niantic, the creators of Pokémon GO.

For those unaware, I will do my best to explain what Pikmin Bloom essentially is. The goal of the game is to walk around outside and find seedlings scattered about. You grow the seedlings by walking a certain amount of steps until they are ready to be plucked. They will then follow you on the map and help you find other items and additional seedlings.

You can feed your Pikmin nectar found from fruit that the Pikmin gather to have them sprout flowers on their heads. You collect the petals from their flowers and plant them as you walk to grow flowers everywhere you walk. Along the way, you may encounter giant flowers that require you to plant smaller flowers all around them for them to bloom. Once the giant flowers bloom you can collect valuable items each time you walk past them. After you reach a certain level, you may also encounter mushrooms, which you can tackle alone or with up to four other people. Upon taking down the mushrooms you will gain various items as well.

This trailer gives a brief overview as to what the game is all about:

As someone who really enjoyed Pokémon GO for a time, I was curious to try out Pikmin Bloom. I don’t play very many phone games, (I much prefer playing the Nintendo Switch for portable games) so I figured I would try it out for a day or two and then be done with it. I did not expect at all to fall in love with it but that is exactly what happened! Below are some of my favorite things about Pikmin Bloom so far:

• I love that like Pokémon Go before it, Pikmin Bloom encourages you to get out and walk. In fact, with less things to stop for in Pikmin Bloom versus Pokémon GO, I find myself walking more and stopping less to interact with the game. As someone who loves walking anyway, this game is perfect for me and I find that it pushes me to walk even further than I typically would.
• Another thing that really incentivizes me to get out and walk is that the app lets you look at any players on your friend list’s total lifetime step count. This has been a huge motivator for me to get out and walk more!
• I also love how simple the game is right now. You can get in and out in just a couple of minutes. It respects my time which is definitely what I am looking for in a phone game.
• I like how there are special Pikmin, called Decor Pikmin, that wear special costumes tied to where you found their seedlings originally. This feature encourages you to walk around places you may not typically think of to try and get all of the various forms of Decor Pikmin.
• I also like the social aspects of Pikmin Bloom. Not only can you send postcards that your Pikmin find to your friends, but if you are with your friends irl, you can walk and plant flowers together, as well as tackle some of the harder expeditions together. It’s a lot of fun to play with a friend or friends!
• The last feature I wanted to highlight is the daily log feature. Every night, you will get a notification to go into the app and look at how you did for the day. It will show you how many steps you had that day as well as show on the map all of the flowers you planted for the day. It will then ask you how your day was and prompt you to post a picture or pictures from your phone that were taken that day as a memory. I initially did not think I would like this feature but it turns out to be a lot of fun! I am looking forward to looking back at my daily log in a few months and being reminded of all of the things I did on various days through the pictures that I uploaded.

If all of this sounds like something you want to check out, I highly encourage you to download it and try it out for yourself. Now is a great time to jump in as Niantic is holding the first Pikmin Bloom Community Day this Saturday on November 13th. You can download it on iOS here and on Google Play here.