Nintendo’s Pictonico! Turns Your Friends’ Photos Into Chaotic WarioWare-Style Minigames
Nintendo is going full weird mode again, and honestly, this is the kind of nonsense mobile gaming could use more of.
The company has announced Pictonico!, a new free-to-download mobile game coming to iOS and Android on May 28. The simple pitch: you take photos of people around you, then the game transforms those faces into strange little minigames.
If that sounds like WarioWare energy, that’s because it basically is. Pictonico! appears to take inspiration from Nintendo’s long-running microgame series, where players are thrown into quick, silly challenges with barely any time to think. Except this time, instead of Wario and friends being the main chaos engine, it’s your friend’s face getting stretched, squashed, and turned into comedy material.
According to the details shared so far, the game includes 80 minigames in total. These games use portrait photos as part of the joke. One example has players pulling open someone’s mouth so they can eat cartoon food. Another turns the person in the photo into a baby with a wildly long tongue.
Yes, it sounds cursed. Yes, it also sounds like the kind of thing that will absolutely kill during lepak sessions.
For Malaysian and SEA players, Pictonico! feels built for group play. This does not sound like the kind of mobile game you grind alone on the MRT unless you’re very committed to taking awkward selfies. It seems more suited for friends hanging out at mamak, cousins gathering during family events, or a Discord group looking for something dumb to stream between ranked matches.
Nintendo has not fully explained whether Pictonico! has a proper solo mode. What we do know is that the game appears to include a score attack mode, some kind of fortune-telling feature, and a stage-based structure. That suggests there may be more here than just random one-off minigames, but the main appeal is clearly the photo-based chaos.
The game is free-to-download, but not everything is included upfront. Nintendo says the free version will not come with all 80 minigames, meaning players will likely need to pay if they want the complete package. There is no confirmed price yet, so Malaysian players should wait and see how the App Store and Google Play pricing lands in RM.
One important detail: Nintendo says photos taken inside the game will stay on the player’s device and will not be sent elsewhere. That matters, because a game built around taking pictures of friends and family immediately raises privacy questions. If Nintendo sticks to that promise, it makes Pictonico! much easier to recommend for casual party play.
This also is not Nintendo’s first time messing around with camera-based comedy. Back in 2009, the company released WarioWare: Snapped! for the Nintendo DSi, which used the handheld’s camera to place players into minigames. Pictonico! feels like a modern mobile version of that same experiment, just with phones doing the heavy lifting.
Will this become the next big mobile party game in Malaysia? Hard to say. But as a free download with Nintendo polish and proper unhinged WarioWare-style energy, Pictonico! is definitely worth keeping an eye on when it launches on May 28.
Source: Engadget
