Overnight Nintendo revealed a brand new mobile game called Pictonico!, which says it will take your photos and turn them into minigames. Looking like it falls somewhere between WarioWare and Project Rub, this completely doolally game wants you to take photos of yourself and friends, and then puts your face into ridiculous challenges, and it all looks pleasingly bonkers.
Due out on May 28, the official site for Pictonico! rather awkwardly declares, “Your photos now a game!” Boasting 80 different minigames, they all seem to be based around portrait photographs either being cut out and placed into silly situations, or the photo itself being manipulated by players—such as stretching a person’s mouth ludicrously open so they can eat cartoon food.
It obviously has a lot in common with WarioWare in the style of micro-games with barmy premises, like snapping a person’s lips up and down to fling off crabs, or a person’s face on a cartoon baby, swinging its tongue around like a helicopter to eat lollipops.
It’s unclear whether it’ll be playable alone (although you could presumably just be a weirdo creep and snap photos of strangers), but there are various modes: There’s a series of stages to clear, a score attack mode, and a super-bizarre-looking fortune telling mode. (The example on the website doesn’t bode enormously well, with a ‘wacky!’ image of a stubbly male-reading face having makeup applied and a female-reading wig with the legend, “Change sometimes begins on the outside.”)
It looks like it’s designed to capture the Insta-adjacent penchant for applying filters to photos, but as truly surreal minigames instead, and that has a lot of promise. It’s a free-to-play model, however, meaning it’s free to install and has a few demo games, but then you’ll need to buy a “game volume” to actually play the game properly. There’s no indication of pricing for those at this point, nor indeed how many of the 80 games will come in a so-called volume.
There are already store links for both the iOS and Android versions of the app, which both feature a smidge more information on Pictonico! Although this too reads like nonsense:
“Turn your photos into minigames!
Sure, it’s kind of silly… But there’s no telling what will happen next!・ Here come your school’s sports stars…strutting down the red carpet!
・ Your boss is hungry and needs your help!
・ Try to wash away those embarrassing high-school memories.”
Nintendo’s forays into mobile gaming have faded of late, having closed down very many short-lived projects over the last decade, so don’t get too attached to this. But hopefully we can have some WarioWare fun while it lasts.
