The Piglet’s Big Game Revisionism of November 2024
Screenshots sourced from Longplay Archive of the Nintendo GameCube version
Piglet’s Big Game is a 2005 adventure game for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube. You play as Piglet exploring the dreams of other Winnie-the-Pooh characters, facing your fears and helping them accomplish tasks in dreamland.
I had this game when I was tiny, and it did scare me. The game stuck with me as a teenager because I remembered specifically, two levels were weirdly atmospheric in a way you wouldn’t expect from a Winnie the Pooh licensed game. The levels I remembered were a library level, and specifically a visual of a spiralling bookshelf going infinitely downwards. I also remembered a black and white castle. As a teenager, I thought “man, that’s a game”, and decided to pick it up to play it again to see how it was.
My description was that it was Winnie-the-Pooh Yume Nikki in theming and general tone. Piglet’s Big Game doesn’t have a very musical soundtrack, except at the start of each level where a little friendly tune will play to indicate a save point. Most of the soundtrack consists of short atmospheric loops, much like Yume Nikki. The game has two stand-out uneasy feeling levels, Owl’s dream and Eeyore’s dream. Owl’s dream is set in some wizardry intellectual tower with lots of books and inkwells and classical art, Eeyore’s dream is set in an above-ground Halloween-y area and a stark black and white castle underground.
There are six levels total. Pooh’s dream, a candyland, Roo’s dream, where everything is made of cardboard and crayons, Rabbit’s dream, which is… gardening themed? and Tigger’s dream which is split between a theme park and snowy cliffs. Each level gets longer and more difficult as you progress, and Tigger’s level feels almost double the length of Rabbit’s.
The thing is I didn’t think this game was a hidden gem. It’s an interesting novelty? I will explain more later, but the reason I’m writing all of this is about a week ago I woke up to see that the game had exploded on Twitter with “Hey what the fuck happens in this game” and Piglet running around in the dark dining room area. People learned that one piece of the soundtrack shares a sample with the song Chthonic Symphony from Silent Hill 2 Remake and ran with “Silent Hill 2 remake sampled Piglet’s Big Game???” but it seems like people did come to figure out the sample is from a sound library Akira Yamaoka has the license for.
Then I started seeing people play the game by downloading a 100% completed save file and just running around the completed areas? It’s like running around in Resident Evil if there were no enemies or puzzles left to do. I were seeing people comment things like “oh man this is so spooky, there’s absolutely nothing there, amazing atmosphere and design”. So here’s an actual review by someone who played it as a kid, as a teenager, and briefly as an adult.
I Mean It’s Got Cool Atmosphere And A Cool Fixed Camera But The Gameplay Loop Is Really Tedious And Bad
Piglet’s Big Game is an adventure game at its core. You run around the various rooms, collect objects, use objects to interact with things in the world to progress. You have Piglet’s friends around sometimes to talk to who can provide direction and a reason for what you’re doing.
You have an inventory of four slots which you can view/use with the face buttons. You pick up a candle, it’s on your X button. You walk over to the chocolate, press X, Piglet will use the candle to melt the chocolate, the candle will disappear from your inventory.
The heffalumps and woozles placed around the level will see Piglet and chase you if you wind up in their line of sight. In horror fashion, the woozles move faster than Piglet, so if you can’t leave the room in time, they can and will touch Piglet and scare him. An interesting note, when they’re about to touch Piglet, the game will play an alarm clock ring very loudly.
Piglet can engage his enemies in combat by facing them and pressing triangle to square them up. You’ll be moved to a purple starry void and the enemy will walk towards you slowly as you perform button input QTEs to perform your Brave Face to scare the enemy until they are defeated and turn into a collectable vial.
Every second level exit is gated by a spooky door who can only be scared by the most recently unlocked Brave Face, therefore gating your progress until you unlock them. How do you unlock Brave Faces?
Here’s where the main gameplay loop is. In every room, there will be objects/geometry/level props that contain cookies. Each cookie dispenser contains five cookies. Piglet can kick the object to get the cookies out, which will fly out of the object. You need to run to collect them, and quickly, because uncollected cookies will wobwobwobwob and then disappear back into the object. Piglet’s slow movement speed, coupled with the fact some objects throw their cookies out far, you are basically guaranteed to miss a few cookies on your first kick and have to slowly go all the way back to the object, then kick it again, then walk back out to collect the cookies.
This cookie system is the major issue with the game, and the main form of gameplay. The game expects you to clear every single room and every single cookie in that room if you want to beat the level, meaning the majority of your gameplay is running around each room and kicking things to see if they will spawn cookies. I would argue it compromises the atmosphere that you have to view the levels through the lens of “which object will throw out cookies when I kick it?”, because they can be pretty much anything. Inkwells, chairs, fences, oak logs, trees. Everything can contain cookie.
Design documents put out by the game’s director described the game length as “10 hours for a medium child” and the cookie system makes complete sense when you remember that. Adventure games often got their length by being intentionally indecipherable with nonsense puzzles, but you don’t want to make one of those for your babby Winnie-the-Pooh licensed game. So kicking random objects in the world to spew out cookies which will quickly vanish back into the object is probably intentionally designed as a time padding activity.
Now that doesn’t make the best game, but remember that this is also a PS2 movie tie-in game. The atmosphere is inspired, but it is also product that had to meet a certain length for parents to get their money’s worth. I don’t think this game is the product of developers who had ideas for a bigger or better game but got stuck making a licensed Disney game, I think this is the product of developers who got the rights to make a licensed Disney game and sprinkled in some interesting, fun ideas on the thing they were contracted to work on.
How Did We Get Here?
I was seeing people on Twitter speculate about how the game’s gameplay could work from short clips, noting that when Piglet takes damage from being scared he’ll move faster. They put this as a potentially interesting or fun ‘risk vs reward’ system, but like that’s not actually a gameplay mechanic, nor is there any real reward involved because to progress you’re going to be picking up items or looking for things that will dispense cookies when you kick them.
It is someone who hasn’t played the game speculating about how its gameplay could work or how it’s secretly genius because the atmosphere is fairly novel.
I will admit a reason it’s suddenly taken off is in part that, yeah, Disney wouldn’t allow a spooky Winnie-the-Pooh game to be made these days, and Disney has just been more protective with its legacy characters in the past 15 years.
There are just less games being made these days, too. A lot of the PS2 library are licensed movie tie-in games which have almost entirely vanished from the modern market, they kind of died in the PS3 era once mobile games became similarly lucrative and more importantly, cheap to produce. The trade-off is when licensed games for kids media do come out, currently almost exclusively made by Outright Games or Microids, people forget that those games were almost always aggressively mediocre. The Bluey video game by Outright Games released to mixed to negative reviews, etc.
My point is, in an era where games were cheaper to produce and most kids movies had PS2 tie-in games, there was more room for experimentation. Games would take like three years to produce at most and if it didn’t do good, well, that’s fine, try again next time. So we have this novelty.
Should I Play?
Since the game became a topic of interest its price has shot up on eBay to like hundreds of dollars, and I would hope that dies down quickly but apparently the retro game market in the US just likes to sell games for hundreds of dollars simply because they’re notable even if they aren’t rare, so I don’t know. If you want to play the game still for the novelty of it, downloading a ROM off the internet is much cheaper. Even if you’re like me and prefer real hardware, most PS2 slims have an exploit which allows you to burn patched ROMs to disks which can boot without issue.
Just note that you’ll be paying for the lovely atmosphere in several hours of cookie collecting.
It’s Ok, Kind Of Recommended, Not As Good As People Are Speculating It To Be