It took me the best part of four hours to click with Gecko Gods. Some may argue that my initial hesitations — about playing through a Zelda-lite 3D adventure as a gecko plucked straight from the wild, with little motivation beyond consuming bugs — put me in the wrong frame of mind from the start. But that was only a niggling kind of hesitation. The frustration that did for me, at least for a while, came from elsewhere.
First, let’s address the gecko in the room. I like to lose myself in games – to have my imagination free to notice connections and themes and ideas. And a gecko more or less presented naturalistically, without any characterisation is difficult to imagine as a lead character on a quest.
I know that animal leads exist elsewhere. Okami. Stray. Untitled Goose Game. But each of these justifies their angle in different ways – a god, a feline trying to get back home, a goose that’s a punchline to a joke.
In Gecko Gods, we’re effectively talking about swapping out Link from a Zelda game and substituting him with a tiny lizard. For me, this was sometimes distracting. This was most apparent during the Wind-Waker-style sailing sections, and when dealing with themes like interacting with religions and fulfilling prophesies. The ensemble didn’t quite fit together.
More positively, I had a clear impression that the Inresin team, led by developer Louis Waloschek, put a lot of love into the project. They spent five years putting together this seven-hour adventure, and you can feel that dedication throughout. (And it’s obvious that Waloschek likes geckos and that he can, ultimately, do whatever he wants to do with his own game).
As for the obvious Zelda comparisons, this is a stripped-back affair. Aside from a few talking birds, there are no other characters to interact with. Combat is minimal. There’s little to the storyline except for the familiar drive to fulfil a prophecy wrapped up in the aura of a mysterious, ancient civilisation.
I’ve seen plenty of people describe Gecko Gods as cosy or chilled-out – a game that promises serene exploration and the taking on of puzzles at your own pace. Unfortunately, I only experienced that for about half the run time.
I don’t know if it’s my fault, but early on I got so confused about how to progress. Some might say, “Well getting lost is kind of the point. You’re meant to explore.” And they’d be right. But a few design choices made orientating myself artificially difficult.
For example, in the quest list, I had the task to open up a big door. The way the tasks were laid out in the menu, I believed I had to do that one first. Well, the door task was one for four hours in the future, and I wasted so much time running back and forth trying to work this out. I don’t know if I missed something – some guiding comment from one of the birds.
Another task on the quest list told me to ‘Visit all five islands on the archipelago’. It had a counter 1/5, then 2/5, and so on. But there were more than five islands, and I found myself taking quite a lot of time sailing (slowly) to one place, alighting from the boat, not impacting the counter, and, honestly, getting annoyed. The few hints I was given left me feeling stupid. I felt as if the game’s communication style forced me into unnecessary backtracking, and I should stress, too, that I normally enjoy exploring in games. I love Metroidvanias, but the ingredients here didn’t quite add up the same way.
For a while, I kept stumbling on side quests that muddied the waters even more. There are skippable relics to collect throughout, but you won’t know they’re skippable and not part of the main quest line until you put 15 minutes after 15 minutes into solving the puzzles that unlock them. I didn’t enjoy these as much as the rest of the game, and if I’d only been able to discern what was necessary and what wasn’t, I’d have been happier. These side puzzles also repeated ideas that were done better elsewhere (mostly turning levers to line up electricity cables).
For all my complaints, though, once momentum picked up in the second half, Gecko Gods had a stretch where it was genuinely enjoyable. I was finally able to discern a side quest from a main quest and to furrow a path along the best-designed parts of the game. The puzzles — moving orbs, focusing lights reflected in mirrors — became more fun. Same with the exploration, even if a lot of the environments felt a touch samey.
The gecko character’s USP is that it can get everywhere. This traversal is mostly well done, but there are drawbacks, too. The camera is low — lizard level — and can make viewing important areas a little cumbersome. Some of these important areas are accessed through near-vertical spaces with steep lips that result in a gecko freefall and having to start the task from scratch.
Performance on the Switch 2 is fine – I think there were a couple of stutters at most. Playing in docked mode negated some of the impact of the low camera and gave the visuals some beneficial scale. The game’s overall presentation — the music, the effects — do their jobs well. By the end of my runthrough, I was happy enough as one island seamlessly linked to another in a satisfying sequence that built to a decent finale.
Gecko Gods is a fairly low-priced indie made with love, and I respect the team and what they’ve achieved even if I was frustrated for a lot of the experience. Some people will love the novelty of playing as a gecko. For me, although I made my peace with the decision, I do wonder if a slightly different approach could have increased my own engagement and made me believe more in what I was being asked to do.
It’s difficult to tell whether some of my frustrations come down to simply taking the wrong turn – or whether I missed a single line of text somewhere that might have set me on a more reasonable path. But I don’t think I missed anything. If you want a short puzzle experience, and you like the idea of playing as a gecko, then Gecko Gods may well be worth your time.
