Thanks to Super Rare Originals and Inresin for the review code!

I played Shadow of the Colossus when I was 15 years old, back when I was more easily capable of experiencing childlike wonder. Despite also getting Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 that same Christmas day and having rolled credits on it before sundown, Shadow of the Colossus managed to stay with me not only for the several additional days it took for me to beat it, but also for the years and years that it’s story and world have sat on my heart and mind. 15 years later, I still adore the vibe, iconography and atmosphere of that game so much that it has remained in my top 10 games of all time. But one game that I’m upset with myself for not completing to this day is their first game, the one that sat right beside Shadow on that PS3 Remaster Collection: Ico.

I’ve tried it back when I finished Shadow, and tried again when it came to PlayStation Plus as a standalone game, but I still have yet to feel the pull strong enough to stick with it to completion. Maybe the lack of spectacle of Shadow and the more intimate scope made the game feel less exciting as a kid, but I am no longer a kid now. Not only am I more tolerant of more intimate, less epic stories, I often actively crave them these days. And while I haven’t quite popped back in Ico, I have played something that released this year that gave me a very similar vibe: Gecko Gods.

Gecko Gods is a chill adventure, puzzle platformer with a miniature open world and it’s the first full scale release by solo dev Inresin. You may be able to tell from just looking at it, but it has one hell of a cozy artstyle. When I say cozy, I don’t necessarily mean that it looks childish and simple, but that it’s so warm and inviting that I felt immediately drawn to it once I saw it in motion. The main reason for the Ico comparison is how faintly magical the world feels while still showing the ancient mechanisms that this magic courses through. You will be turning cranks and walking over dusty old contraptions, but so often they will be animated by fantastical elements that defy logic in the best way possible. Everything from the cuts of stone to the paintings and glyphs applied to them just enhances the mythical feeling the world impressed onto me, and seeing that artstyle flex its variety was a highlight.

But the game is more than fun to look at, it’s quite fun to play. Earlier I called this a puzzle game, and it is, but often the puzzling parts come through the minimalist form of the game. There is some written dialogue at key points, but the game contains no audible words, and no on-screen indications of where to go and what to do, outside of a minimal map and list of collectables in the pause menu. This means you really have to scan and interact with the environment just to understand how it all works together, let alone how to traverse through it.. Some of the puzzles were a bit more explicit, and that often annoyed me. By this I mean that those sliding tile puzzles, the ones with one tile missing, do appear here and as someone who has never been good at them, they often slowed the pace to a halt while I banged my head against them. Thankfully these are rare, and the rest of the puzzles are solid to great.

However, solving those puzzles have an extra sprinkle of challenge added due to you being a gecko. This means you can make the most adorable little mouth sounds whenever you want, dash into bugs to eat them and pots to smash them, and most importantly, walk or run across nearly any surface. Walking on walls and ceilings stays novel throughout the game, though going around corners at high speeds can sometimes result in you running right off an unexpected cliffside. But ceilings often frustrate more than anything else in the game. For some reason, the movement of the game is dependent on the orientation of the camera. That only is a problem if you don’t have control of the camera, like in a game with fixed camera angles.

Think about those moments in Resident Evil or Devil May Cry where you walk into a room holding right on your joystick only for the definition of “right on your joystick” changing as soon as the camera does, and now you’re walking in a new, unintended direction. Well, in Gecko Gods, you can control the camera, but ceilings tend to act as a brand new room or even plane of existence. Everytime I cling upside-down from anything in the game, my movement controls are immediately inverted, which I can only assume is a misguided attempt to have my controls match the newly flipped perspective of the gecko. But it never feels natural, even when I finally align the camera to center the gecko properly. This isn’t the only issue with movement and camera angles, though thankfully it is the most egregious. Some rotational cranks require you to move your gecko in a circular motion, which is easy enough to do, but some of the camera angles that are panned to while cranking can make the orientation confusing to parse. Often the mechanism you are moving rotates in a different direction than your gecko moves, so you spend a few seconds each time just to see if the direction you intend to move is indeed the correct way to move.

Thankfully, those orientation issues are the biggest issues I had with the game, and with exception of one softlocking bug that was later fixed in a patch, it was one of the few points of friction in the game. I say that as both a good and bad thing because, well, this game does go down too smoothly at times. This isn’t a major issue, as I found it nice to play something that didn’t get my heart racing so much. But near the end of the game, it finally delivers platforming challenges that introduce some real danger into gameplay. Sure, you could always drown in the ocean if you swam in it long enough, or you could run into the thorns of a cactus long enough for your tail to fall off before growing back. But the game overall is very light on challenge outside of wrestling with puzzles or the controls. I think that extra bit of challenge could have been introduced earlier to spice up the back half of the game, but that is more of a want than a need for me.

That’s a lot of words on the negatives, but I really wanna further hammer home how I do in fact love this game. I love how this game feels just grand enough to evoke awe of a world beyond that of the sole gecko while also being small enough to see most of its secrets in just over 6 hours. I love how the collectable currency you get from dashing into pots and enemies can be spent on new colors and skin patterns for your gecko. I love how the mouth sounds you can make can be funneled into horns around the world to call your sailboat to you, and that those horns amplify your soft squeaks into hilariously absurd roars that fill the air. I love how the music feels so in sync with the visuals and tone of the world that it often feels like you are exploring in silence, as if the music is just the natural sound of the places you roam. There is so much to love about this game, but those small gripes I do have are enough to keep this from getting the highest marks possible. Perhaps with some tweaks to movement when camera orientation changes would make this game perfect. But even with those few blemishes, the face of this game is still beautiful enough to fall in love with. Despite being twice the age I was when I first touched the games of Team Ico, this game was able to deliver some of the wonder I first felt when approaching that first Colossus. So, even if the controls aren’t perfect, I think that wonder is still worth experiencing.