If you haven’t played a Pikmin game before, you might be surprised to learn that the series can get quite dark. Sure, it stars a bunch of adorable plant-like beings — the titular pikmin — who navigate a huge world full of similarly cute creatures. It’s bright and colorful in the way that Nintendo games tend to be. But it’s also pretty creepy at times, with unsettling enemies to go up against, dark caverns to explore, and the way the pikmin will throw themselves into battle, with hordes able to overwhelm and kill larger creatures, whose corpses they then cart off to be repurposed. Pikmin is light on the surface but darker the more you think about it — and the latest entry takes things a step further with a survival mode and some ghostly new pikmin that only come out at night.

At its core, Pikmin 4 isn’t all that different than its predecessors. It’s still a mix between a puzzle / adventure game and an RTS, where you command groups of little pikmin to explore areas and complete missions. In this game, it’s a rescue mission — or, rather, a number of them. First, series staple Captain Olimar gets lost on an Earth-like planet, and then the rescue team that sets out to save him gets similarly stuck. You play as a new recruit — for the first time in the series, you can make your own character — who first has to rescue the rescuers and then the captain himself.

You do this, as always, with the help of pikmin. Basically, the world of these games is like a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids type of scenario; mundane locations become wondrous because you’re just so darn tiny. The first area in Pikmin 4 is a simple suburban backyard, but for your character, it’s a huge forest full of secrets. Your budding rescue ranger doesn’t actually do much themself. They’re more of a manager. You collect and control pikmin, which are beings that are weak on their own but work well in groups. If you tell a bunch to, say, fight a frog-like creature or collect a discarded Game Boy, they’ll do it. You also have a two-legged alien dog to help.

Controlling the pikmin plays out a bit like an RTS, but the game itself is all about exploration. Your time is divided into days, and the goal is to see, do, and collect as much as possible before nightfall. Your main goal is to rescue everyone, but to get there, you’ll need to open up new areas, discover new pikmin (each color has unique attributes), and collect all kinds of “treasures” that can be used to create upgraded gear, helping you explore even more as additional locales open up. It’s a very satisfying progression cycle that really encourages you to venture into every nook and cranny of an area.

There are a few new elements in Pikmin 4 that switch things up. For starters, some of the people you rescue have a strange affliction where they have leaves growing out of their heads. For some reason, they like to challenge you to a sort of puzzle, where the goal is to collect a minimum amount of treasures and enemy corpses within a specific timeframe. With the clock ticking down, these more focused challenges are a nice change of pace from the laid-back standard gameplay, even if I don’t quite understand why they exist narratively.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the only way to cure your leafy friends is by collecting a strange, gooey, glowing substance that can only be found at night. And here’s where Pikmin 4 really embraces its darker elements. Basically, nighttime excursions are the equivalent of a horde or survival mode, where you use glowing pikmin to fight enraged enemies as they attempt to destroy the hive where the goo comes from.

The goal is to survive the night so that you can bring some of the healing slop back to your base. These challenges get pretty intense, but they’re most notable for the vibe, which is a lot creepier than your typical Pikmin outing. Not only is it dark, but the enemies you go up against are red-eyed and single-mindedly focused on destruction, coming at you in waves that can feel, at times, as if they’ll never end. Meanwhile, the new pikmin look like glow-in-the-dark versions of the tree spirits from Princess Mononoke, which is to say they wouldn’t be out of place haunting your dreams.

Again, Pikmin as a family-friendly horror game isn’t entirely new as a concept. It’s been there, at least in small doses, since the very beginning. Junji Morii, an art director at Nintendo who helped create the final design for the pikmin, recently said in an interview that “back then, I really liked the world of Tim Burton, so I wanted the designs to not just be cute, but also give a sense of eeriness, or some emotional weight.”

What Pikmin 4 does is very straightforward — and very successful. It takes a formula that already works well and builds on it with new ideas that are completely additive and don’t take away from what has made the series so beloved. That’s more than enough reason to play it, even if you’ve never touched a Pikmin before. But the sequel also goes a step further by digging further into its creepier elements and pushing them to the forefront.

It’s still cute and colorful, with all of that patented Nintendo polish — but now you might want to consider playing Pikmin with the lights on.

Pikmin 4 launches on the Nintendo Switch on July 21st.