Back in 2006, Rare found itself at a crossroads. The developer had spent the 1990s working with Nintendo, creating some of the SNES, Game Boy, and N64’s most beloved titles. In 2002, though, it was acquired by Microsoft, becoming a first-party developer for its new game console. In the transition, some of Rare’s magic seemed to have been lost. None of the four games it developed in the intervening years were hits, critically or commercially, on anything like the scale of its Nintendo golden years.

As such, 2006’s Viva Piñata was positioned as a comeback for the studio. The game was aimed at a younger audience and was intended to be the beginning of a fully fledged franchise, complete with its own animated TV show. On these terms, the game was not the success it deserved to be – but it proved that the embers of that old Rare magic still burned bright.

In Viva Piñata, the player is handed the deeds to a rough patch of land and tasked with turning it into a bustling garden by filling it with plants, decorations, and – the game’s undisputed stars – animals. Piñatas, to be precise, of which there are 60 varieties, from Arocknid to Zumbug, to attract into your garden with the hope that they’ll make it their home.

This is achieved by meeting a tick list of needs for each species: the right kind of tree for them to nest in, enough water for aquatic creatures to splash around in, and the component parts of their diet. It’s a gentle start to the game, but the process of winning over a piñata is truly satisfying. Spotting a new species for the first time is a treat. All 60 are charmingly designed, with names that pun on a type of sweet, like Profitamole or Buzzlegum. Visiting piñatas start out monochrome, but convince them to become residents and they’ll bloom into full colour, revealing their vibrant blues, yellows and purples – the perfect visual reward for your efforts.

It’s not hard to see why Microsoft saw the opportunity for a kid’s TV series in Viva Piñata. Cuteness can be an easy thing to dismiss, but Rare pulls it off here with the kind of deft hand usually reserved for Disney cartoons and litters of puppies. Every bit of incidental animation is charming, bringing the piñatas and their world to adorable life.

Don’t you dare smash one

Back in the Nintendo days, Rare had created Banjo-Kazooie, a series of kid-friendly games which were among the biggest sellers on the N64. In the Donkey Kong Country games, it filled out DK’s supporting cast with the likes of Diddy and Cranky Kong. After the failure of Kameo: Elements of Power, an Xbox 360 launch title with a similar Saturday-morning cartoon aesthetic and a Pokémon-like cast of creatures, Viva Piñata provided much-needed proof that the design talent behind those older games was still alive and well.

Viva Piñata is more than just a pretty face, though. As the game progresses, it drip-feeds the player a steady stream of new challenges. First, the introduction of ‘piñatavores’, which won’t settle in your garden until they’ve eaten one of its existing residents. There’s a certain old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly logic to attracting some piñatas at the top of the food chain: you lure in a Mousemallow to feed to a Syrupent, then feed the Syrupent to a Macaracoon and so on. This is further complicated by the ability to breed animals, which involves checking off another set of requirements to help get them in the mood. Smaller piñatas, it seems, serve as the perfect aphrodisiac. This can test your loyalties – say you want to breed the foxy Pretztails, but have grown attached to the two Bunnycombs who have settled in the garden. Naturally you get the latter to do what rabbits do best, and make another Bunnycomb – so you can feed that cute little baby straight to a Pretztail.

As you nudge forward through the game, waiting for the right animal to wander into your garden, tending to plants, and building homes for your favourites, the initially gentle pace begins to snowball. Viva Piñata introduces ‘sour’ piñatas, who drop sweets that can poison a resident; weeds that can spring up and choke your existing plants; masked Ruffians who vandalise and start fights. It’s around this point that you begin to glimpse the game’s hidden dark side.

Rotten candy

Family-friendly games weren’t the only thing Rare was known for. Titles such as Killer Instinct, GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark brought a vital edge to Nintendo’s catalogue. Conker, one of the cutesy animal characters created for Diddy Kong Racing, was revamped into a sweary, hard-drinking squirrel armed with Uzis and a chainsaw. By 2006, though, games had to work considerably harder to shock. Six months after the launch of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Rockstar changed the gaming landscape with the release of Grand Theft Auto III. Xbox consoles had made their name with the likes of Halo, Splinter Cell and – launched just days before Viva Piñata – Gears of War. An attempt to return to Rare’s more bloody roots with Perfect Dark Zero proved disappointing.

While it may not have been obvious on the surface, though, some of this spirit lived on in Viva Piñata. The violence is kept strictly PG – when a piñata is killed, they pop open and spill their sweets on the ground, accompanied by the sound of children cheering – but it’s effective because the game has encouraged you to invest in these creatures. The early game incentivises naming your piñatas with mechanical reward, sneakily building attachment. After all, which are you going to care more about, ‘Horstachio 1′ or the one named after your childhood pet? As anyone who’s watched Bambi or The Lion King will tell you, the death of loved animals isn’t exactly out of the realms of children’s entertainment, but Rare finds new opportunities to twist the knife. Those spilt sweets will get eaten by passing piñatas, meaning it’s not unusual to catch a treasured Fudgehog snaffling up the innards of its former lover. The circle of life, lovingly rendered in all its gory glory.

And then Dastardos floats into your garden. The game’s equivalent of the Grim Reaper, Dastardos is genuinely sinister. He glides just off the ground, a rigid expression on his Picasso mask, towards any piñatas who have fallen sick. “Dastardos has invented a cheerful song to help him through the day and make piñatas calm while he ‘fixes’ them,” reads the in-game description. By fixing, of course, it means bashing them open with a big stick. Suffice to say, Dastardos is not a welcome presence in your garden. But as the pace picks up, he’s an increasingly common sight.

Viva Piñata increases the tension through something that’s either a trick smartly borrowed from survival-horror games or a brilliant accident: the tools it gives you are just a little imprecise. The game plays out in real time, and its controls often make it feel like you’re trying to complete a very delicate task with a very long pole.

This is an offshoot of the god-game genre, but one which casts you as a hapless god. Your shovel can be brought down like a lightning bolt from Zeus, but you lack that all-important omniscience – meaning you can only react to things once they’ve already started happening.

Turn your back for one second too long, and a wild piñata can sneak into your garden on the hunt. The game pings you with a notification when this happens, but if you don’t act quickly, it’ll all be over before you can intervene. When things start to go wrong, you can suddenly find yourself drowning in notifications, trying to pick through all the ones about plants drying out to get to the real trouble.

Two of your favourite piñatas are fighting, so you reach for the shovel and… Too late. One of them falls to the ground, sickly green. You notice a gate open in the pen separating predators from prey… Too late. A Cocoadile is gulping down your beloved Donald, the Quackberry you spent time and money dressing up. You spot a sour piñata, and look for the seeds it inevitably left behind… Too late. Red, ugly plants climb up, spitting fire and poisonous gas, choking and trapping whole piñata populations, meaning you miss the poisoned candies the sour also dropped on the other side of the garden.

Self-flagulation

When these disasters start to happen, you notice the game doesn’t offer any quick save or load options. It’s not exactly Ironman mode, but Viva Piñata is pushing you to stick with the consequences. The only way to sidestep the game’s permanence is by shutting it down mid-session, praying for a convenient autosave.

That this option is so tempting is testament to Viva Piñata’s success, building just slowly enough that you get invested in this cutesy world, before baring its teeth. The game works because it blends the brightness of Banjo-Kazooie with the harder edge Rare that showed in early games such as Killer Instinct and Battletoads.

Unfortunately, when it came to finding an audience, this meant that Viva Piñata fell between two stools. The game did well enough to launch a handful of sequels and spin-off games, but sold a small fraction of what Rare’s biggest hits had managed. After a couple more games, the studio was folded more closely into Microsoft, working on avatars for Xbox Live and a string of Kinect games. It’s only now, with Sea of Thieves, that Rare is stepping back into the spotlight – and so in 2018, the developer once again finds itself at a crossroads, with a bold new game positioned as its big comeback.

Until we ever get a new Viva Pinata, why not try these games like Palworld?