One captain, one pup, and a planet full of tiny plant creatures that only need a nudge.
Pikmin 4 is Nintendo EPD's return to the real-time strategy puzzle series, built on Unreal Engine 4 and released for Nintendo Switch on July 21, 2023. You play a single Rookie Rescue Officer with a character creator for the first time in mainline history, paired with Oatchi - a Rescue Corps dog who flies your Pikmin squad, breaks obstacles and solves puzzles alongside you. This wiki covers all nine Pikmin types, every area and cave on PNF-404, the full boss list, the 50 castaways, the mechanics that changed from Pikmin 3, and the Switch 2 Edition with Dandori Academy that lands on November 12, 2026.
The Rescue Corps dog flies a second Pikmin squad of his own, breaks obstacles, carries objects, sniffs out treasure and can even carry you across gaps. Half of the game is played with two teams instead of one.
Glow Pikmin only come out after dark, and Night Expeditions have you defend Luminals from waves of creatures. It is the first mainline entry with a real night cycle.
Mistakes no longer mean replaying the whole day. Pikmin 4 gives you a rewind that undoes a bad order, which is the single biggest quality-of-life change over Pikmin 3.
The first mainline Pikmin with a character creator. Name, colour and face are all yours, and the game carries that identity into every cutscene.
Pikmin 4 is the fourth mainline entry in Nintendo's real-time strategy puzzle series, developed by Nintendo EPD with Eighting and published by Nintendo. It launched for Nintendo Switch worldwide on July 21, 2023, and a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition bundled with Dandori Academy arrives on November 12, 2026.
Structurally it is a bigger swing than any previous entry. Pikmin 3 let you rotate between three captains; Pikmin 4 gives you one customizable Rookie Rescue Officer and no captain-switching at all. In their place is Oatchi, a Rescue Corps dog who commands his own squad of Pikmin, carries objects, rushes through obstacles, swims across water so that non-Blue Pikmin can cross, and can pick you up and carry you. Two squads means two sets of type gates to solve, and that puzzle is where most of the game's design energy went.
The camera sits lower than in Pikmin 3, which makes the game read closer to an action title than to a traditional RTS. Exploration has no day-time limit, so there is no clock to optimise against. Caves are hand-built rather than procedurally generated, which is the most important change to the series' structure. And when you do make a mistake, the game offers a time rewind instead of asking you to restart the day.
Reception was strong: 87 on Metacritic for the Switch release from roughly 120 critic reviews, 88 on OpenCritic ("Mighty", 96% recommend) from around 110 reviews, and Best Simulation/Strategy at The Game Awards 2023. IGN, Nintendo Life, Nintendo World Report, Game Informer and Destructoid all gave it a 9 or higher. The recurring complaints are equally consistent: no minimap or navigation tools, long loading times, an easier difficulty curve than earlier entries, and a co-op mode where the second player only controls a pointer rather than a second captain.
Pikmin 4 is one of the most decorated and best-selling entries in Nintendo's history of small-games franchises, and it holds several firsts that shape how it is talked about.
A free update in November 2025 added Decor Pikmin (transferable between Pikmin 4 and Pikmin Bloom), a field camera photo mode, and two new Creature Activity Levels - Relaxed, where creatures only attack if you attack first, and Fierce, which raises difficulty and caps your squad at 60. For the Switch 2 Edition, Nintendo is shipping Dandori Academy, a new competitive mode built around timed treasure-collection exams and online leaderboards.