JAPAN GAMING & ENTERTAINMENT 
Tails comes rolling in with a Spin Dash and brakes too late. Sonic, standing right in front of him, falls. SONIC PICO PARK is a puzzle action game in which up to eight players work together to clear stages. Its director, the creator of the co-op puzzle game PICO PARK, says this was the first scene that came to mind when pairing it with Sonic.
SONIC PICO PARK comes out November 12 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch and PC (Steam and other stores). The latest entry in the PICO PARK series, it supports 2 to 8 players, locally or online, with cross-play between platforms. Playing online on PS5 requires PlayStation Plus. Every bit of content is playable at any player count, and English is among the supported languages. TECOPARK develops the game and PICO PARK Inc. publishes it, as a partner title licensed by SEGA.
What do you do in a single stage?
The objective is to get every player to the goal on the right side of the stage. One player getting there alone doesn’t finish it. In PICO PARK, the goal was a door. Here, it’s the goal plate familiar from the 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games.
The demo playable in June, right after the announcement, had players moving left and right, jumping and using the Spin Dash. It had eight stages and took about 20 minutes to clear. At a separate early session that June, players reportedly shouted directions at one another by character name, telling the Sonic player to go first and calling for someone to hop on Tails’ head.
Which parts of Sonic made it into the puzzles?
Everyone can Spin Dash. It breaks obstacles, and in one spot, a player Spin Dashes off the top of a stack of teammates to reach a button up high. PICO PARK has walls that only move when at least as many players as the number written on them push together. Here, that becomes a wall that breaks when that many players hit it with a Spin Dash at the same time.
You can run through 360-degree loops and climb half-pipe walls. Keep moving in one direction and you shift into a dash. Springs launch teammates up to higher platforms. They can also leave a player bouncing with no way out, says the head of PICO PARK Inc.
Each character moves differently, too. Tails can fly and carry other characters. Knuckles glides diagonally downward when you press jump again in midair. Sonic and Amy use the moves everyone shares: running, jumping and the Spin Dash. In August, Shadow the Hedgehog was revealed to be joining as well. PICO CAT from PICO PARK shows up alongside them. Everything is drawn in pixel art, with Sonic and the others rendered in PICO CAT’s style.
Who gets the ring?
Hold at least one ring, and touching an enemy or spikes won’t take you out. Your rings just scatter. Get hit with zero rings, and you’re out.
June’s demo had stages built around splitting those rings up. In one, pressing a switch sends a screenful of spikes flying in. They can’t be dodged, so whoever grabs the single ring nearby walks into them on purpose and breaks through. In another, the group has to get past lasers coming down from above, so four players each take one ring and everyone can afford a single hit. If someone ends up with two, another player Spin Dashes into them to knock a ring loose.
In this game, the familiar rings look set to become something teammates divvy up among themselves, deciding who steps up to take the hit.
Why did a studio outside SEGA end up borrowing Sonic?
PICO PARK began as the director’s solo project. Its online-enabled version spread among streamers in 2021, and the series has now sold more than 8 million copies. The idea of teaming up with Sonic came from the PICO PARK side. The head of PICO PARK Inc. wanted to take PICO PARK worldwide, and to sell more in the United States in particular, and went straight to SEGA’s president with a pitch.
At first, the director says, it looked like little more than a matter of adding character skins. A proposal document alone didn’t quite get the idea across, so the director quickly built a prototype, and SEGA understood the moment they saw it. That prototype leaned pretty heavily toward Sonic, though, the head of PICO PARK Inc. recalls. By that account, the direction came together after advice from the Sonic series producer: it didn’t have to be Sonic, so make PICO PARK, and make whatever the director wanted to make. In a September interview, that producer said the direction the game took was a little unexpected even to SEGA.
Why did the director first picture Tails sending Sonic falling?
What the director values most in PICO PARK is less the co-op itself than getting people to enjoy the back-and-forth between them. To that end, the director has lately been championing an idea called accidents with an excuse: when one player drags the group down, that player should be able to fire back with a reason for doing what they did.
The opening scene has that kind of comeback, too. The player whose Sonic just fell complains, asking what on earth the Tails player was doing. The Tails player answers that they were trying to brake. The moment that scene came to mind, the director says, it was clear that Sonic’s basic moves could build that exchange.