I’m a Sonic the Hedgehog sicko. If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that I love rolling around at the speed of sound. I’ve always got places to go and a rainbow to follow. But to this day, I still have trouble getting my friends to play Sega’s platformers, too. Whether it’s because they don’t jive with the speedy guy’s platforming or because they heard someone say 20 years ago that Sonic games had a troubling transition to 3D and just never bothered to consider if that was still true in 2026, some folks aren’t down to get down with the blue blur and his ensemble cast of friends and foes. However, I think I finally have something that might get them to do spin dashes with me: Sonic Pico Park.
As the name implies, Sonic Pico Park is a Sonic-themed take on the cooperative platformer Pico Park, which requires multiple players to coordinate with each other to get through obstacle courses. This can mean timing jumps at the right time, stacking on top of one another as the poor bastard on the bottom walks you all through a section in the hopes that it will allow you all to get through it at once, or carrying your teammates over a giant chasm because you’re the only one who can fly. Pico Park is basically like putting four people in one body where they each control a different limb, with your comms basically being the brain signals that (hopefully) make them all work in synchronicity.
When I played the game at Summer Game Fest, it was with three strangers, so we spent a chunk of the demo getting past the social anxiety of trying to decide who would take charge and coordinate as we tried to move through some of the early levels as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy. Some characters have distinct movement abilities, such as Knuckles’ glide and Tails’ flight, but by and large, most characters have uniform tools like a spin dash to move forward quickly and a standard jump. But while some levels the group navigates have the series’ signature loop-de-loops, you aren’t meant to go sprinting through the levels in Pico Park. Every level is a puzzle that you must all solve together, and that means that even the most-quickly-deduced solutions must be executed with a methodical, steady hand…
…and that’s where things get complicated, because playing the game with people you don’t know, can barely communicate with, and who don’t know how to play the game leads to entire sections of chaos as everyone tries to get a handle on what to do next and how to coordinate with one another. Sonic staples like the bouncing spring are strategically placed in levels, so one person might end up being launched to the opposite side of the stage and knocking themselves into their teammates, throwing off a carefully constructed plan just because someone barely grazed the outer edge of the obstacle and sent everyone tumbling down a hole with them.
Pico Park is the kind of game that you can only play with people who have a sense of humor, or with whom you have bonds that are strong enough to survive the mild inconvenience of having to meticulously recreate a solution that someone can undermine in a split second.The Sonic variation of this brings with it its own unique challenges and needs for creative problem solving. How are you going to position everyone so they can spin-dash into an obstacle without accidentally sending them falling down a trap and dragging your tethered teammates down with you?
All of this would be maddening if Sonic Pico Park weren’t also hilarious, fair in its absurdist challenge, and the type of “friendslop” (complimentary) that brings people together. By the time I finished the demo with three strangers, the group had formed a bit of a rapport and was able to coordinate well enough to get through every level Sega was showing at SGF. Now I just want to play it with my friends, and god, I hope Sega puts my boy Shadow the Hedgehog in it. When I asked if he would be joining the chaos, the Sega rep said they’d have more information in the coming months. Not a yes, but not a no, and given the final game will support up to eight players, I’m hopeful.
Sonic Pico Park is coming to PC and “other platforms.”
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