Gecko Gods was provided by Super Rare Originals for review. Thank you!
My lack of love and talent for puzzle and platformer games is pretty notorious, although I have enjoyed games like A Hat in Time and Big Hops for their comfortable approach to narrative and gameplay. I’m still terrible at them, though, and Gecko Gods is no exception. While I cannot say I like Gecko as much as I did those two titles, there is still plenty to appreciate.
Gecko Gods is fairly light on story, favoring a more realistic design over something out of a cartoon. It is a nice deviation from the likes of blue hedgehogs that go really fast, at least! It is a game about exploration and atmosphere over anything else, with no real-time pressure or even combat mechanics to grapple with. As the name suggests, you take the role of a small, cute gecko, exploring the skeletal remains of an ancient civilization across a large archipelago.
Why this gecko cares about uncovering the secrets of this old, crumbling empire is anyone’s guess. With no dialogue from the player avatar, I can only imagine. Maybe he just wants to do his own thing. I wouldn’t expect a glowing narrative on the level of The Alters or Esoteric Ebb, but environmental storytelling and exploration are the key strengths of this game, and it does a pretty good job at achieving its goals.
However, the biggest achievement of Gecko Gods is how it approaches movement. Being a gecko, all the usual platforming mechanics are how they should be, but you can also climb on walls. And ceilings. And pretty much everywhere. This completely changes how the platformer design works in a great way. If you cannot make a jump, so what? Just climb that wall for a little while. No wonder the developer went for a more relaxing approach to the gameplay loop, because a thing like this in Crash Bandicoot or Mario would completely break the game!
I must give them credit for how realistic everything feels, especially in how the gecko moves around, and I got completely immersed in the world. Even when I did not care for the whims of these weird gods who gave random lizards like me jobs, I did not need an excuse to explore the open world.
But that does not mean that you are completely safe. Some things can hurt you like wild animals and weird mechanical tricksters. Given that you can just scurry up a wall to escape, they are not much of a threat. There isn’t really any combat in Gecko Gods, although you can ram into enemies like a speeding train into a group of unlucky people. It is the most rudimentary battle tactic I have seen in a while, but it gets the job done. You also cannot survive in water for long. You can swim short distances, but don’t try what I did and cross to another island. Fortunately, due to plot convenience and the help of a lovely raven, you get access to a wooden raft for just that purpose!
The atmosphere in Gecko Gods is also gorgeous, with the visuals and sound design. Exploring caves and listening to the echoes of wildlife, waves crashing against rocks, and just vibing in this ancient, lost world is the main appeal for me. The puzzles are just the right mix of engaging and challenging, without being too difficult, which is exactly what I was looking for. The music is relaxing, although I found some of the beats a little repetitive. There are collectibles and artifacts in all nooks and crannies, and despite the languid nature of the gameplay, I never felt bored. You can even customize the gecko later in the game using the collectible currency, which is a nice touch.
While all of this sounds amazing and most of my time with Gecko Gods is, I ran into some pretty large annoyances. With many 3D platformers, the camera can be a major bugbear, and Gecko Gods is no exception. Too often, I had the camera zoom right up my gecko’s little bottom, which usually happens when climbing an object with several tight angles.
I also ran into some nasty bugs. A few enemies in the caves also had buggy animations in their projectile attacks. Early on, I ran into a couple of soft locks, including one nasty bug during the quest to access the boat when the final gate did not open, forcing me to start another game.
I have other gripes. The game relies on an autosave that doesn’t tell the player anything. There are obvious breather sections that look like checkpoints in normal games, but I wish it just gave me a way to save the game whenever I wanted. While there is a map, there is no way to pan across it to determine locations with the controller, which I imagine is just a bug. My biggest pet peeve was being unable to locate the raft.
I get the immersive idea behind relying on memory and world navigation, but the seas are pretty choppy, and more than once, I found my raft had floated away from where I had parked it. As you can imagine, this isn’t good for a lizard that cannot swim very far. It is incredibly easy to lose your raft. Fortunately, you can recall the raft using a conch horn on each island, though it was tricky to locate. One time, I thought I had lost my raft permanently and wondered if I would have to start a new game. I blundered into the conch by mere chance. A new patch has added the boat recall location to the minimap, so players should not have as much trouble as I did. It is nice to see issues getting patched, of course.
With all this in mind, Gecko Gods is a mixture of extreme highs and some considerable lows. The latter are things that can be fixed easily with patches, I imagine, but they are always worth mentioning. Despite these drawbacks, Gecko Gods offers a unique and atmospheric experience that should appeal to platformer fans.
While Gecko Gods is certainly playable on the Steam Deck, the performance leaves something to be desired.
Full controller support is available out of the box, which is nice, and you can adjust graphical settings such as textures and shadow quality. Sadly, you cannot disable shadows entirely. It is always helpful to have some wriggle room, but Gecko Gods is surprisingly power hungry. Even with a default TDP, the game struggled to hit 50FPS in the more open areas, and I saw several frame drops when leaping around the landscape. This is probably down to the optimization still needing work, but it means we have a compromised experience.
Locking the framerate to 30FPS/90hz refresh rate was the best option I had to ensure the smoothest experience possible. I kept the graphics preset on medium, with shadows on medium, to strike the best balance between performance and visual quality, and it did the job fairly well. It is a shame that Gecko Gods feels compromised when it can't hit 60 FPS, but this was the best option I had. The game still looks gorgeous, and the meditative pace helps at least.
I tried messing around with the TDP to squeeze extra battery life, but you need the smoothest gameplay possible when playing any platformer. With these current settings, I saw an average power draw of 12 watts in the open spaces. The 30FPS framerate cap helped greatly with battery life, as when playing the game without it, I saw the average power draw hitting 17 watts and up on average. I got around 4 hours of battery life on the Steam Deck OLED, which is pretty solid all things considered.
Gecko Gods is available in English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.
There are a decent number of accessibility settings in Gecko Gods. Vsync, auto camera, X/Y camera access, and controller sensitivity are always nice to have, as well as rebindable controls on both gamepad and with a mouse/keyboard. There is no way to scale the font, unfortunately, as some text on the Steam Deck is a little small, and there is no colorblind support.
Gecko Gods is a game of contrasts for me. I love the unique transversal mechanic and the atmosphere of casually exploring the world. Being able to walk on walls changes exploration entirely, and Inresin has done a great job with the overall gameplay.
An irritating camera and some nasty bugs make Gecko Gods harder to recommend, although the game's unique mechanics still made it deeply enjoyable for me to play. Provided some of these teething issues get fixed, players should be in for a great time. The Steam Deck's performance could do with some work, but it is playable.
このレビューはPC版に基づいています。
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Gecko Gods is a gorgeous and atmospheric puzzle platformer with some unique mechanics, although some bugs and average performance makes it fall slightly short of an all-time great.
