For an indie title, Kukoos: Lost Pets offers players a taste of charming 3D-platforming that has a potential for something much greater in the future, and I'm interested in seeing what more Kukoos has to offer in the future. Its ability-based platforming encourages folks to exercise precision, dexterity, and thoughtfulness, but I can't help but want more from PetitFabrik's charming universe that is the Kukoos. Sure, the Switch may not best accommodate precision compared to other platforms, but the platforming proper and successful charm of Kukoos is definitely enough to hold you over this holiday season.
Kukoos: Lost Pets (Kukoos) is an incredibly charming 3D-platformer that is available NOW on multiple platforms, including the Switch. Developed by PetitFabrik, a Brazilian indie dev team, Kukoos enters a category of games already dominated by the likes of classics like Mario, Kirby, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro. How does this indie title fare?
Honestly? It’s pretty okay, especially for a brand new title from a smaller company that has demonstrated promise by supporting its early access title and aims to make this title better in the near future. Some of you may have hit-or-miss experiences with indie developers, but this is but another example of a personal passion project among folks who enjoy what they do.
The story of Kukoos: Lost Pets is seemingly simple and presented to players through short cutscenes: As K, you’re tasked with undoing an experiment gone wrong by saving hostile pets! You’re sent through the massive Kukoo tree that contains several colorful biomes to collect as many pets as possible, finding new friends along the way. However, I noticed that there is less of an emphasis on the story than the platforming, which is disheartening. The Kukoos are so cute!
The best platformer’s level designs, at least from a gameplay perspective, offer ebbs and flows. You begin with a single mechanic, often the single jump. More mechanics are introduced as you play, encouraging you to utilize multiple mechanics while being deterred by increasingly difficult and complex enemies. Kukoos‘ levels err more consistent, meaning that the difficulty is a slower-than-expected increase rather than one that is incremental. Levels encourage horizontal and vertical traversal, and I was often encouraged to do some exploring off the beaten path on my way to the goal. Kukoos‘ levels are straightforward to a point while still offering me the opportunity to explore, and I often did. However, one design choice I noted was present from the beginning was the use of bottomless pits. Almost every single level has a bottomless pit within it, and the lack of guardrails confining you to any particular platform means that it’s more possible than not to jump off the edge of a map.
If you’re a fan of platforming, you may very well enjoy how much Kukoos encourages you to slow down and make thoughtful actions as you’re moving through levels, be it crossing a gap or defeating an enemy. Precision is a valuable asset while playing. Sure, there are multiple checkpoints in every level, so if you accidentally jump off a platform (which is something you’re assuredly going to do, as almost every level has bottomless pits galore) you’ll be teleported back to your most recent checkpoint. However, there are two serious issues with the precision here: First, the Switch is absolutely not known for affording players precision or precise joystick inputs. Second, if you die from taking too much damage or jumping off a cliff, you’re not quickly and promptly teleported to the checkpoint you recently hit. Instead, the entire level reloads itself (often for at least 15 seconds at a time) and places you at that checkpoint. While playing, I often became frustrated with how easily I would fall off a platform in a boss battle or in a usual level, and I would sit stewing while the levels took a while to load thinking my progress was taking one step forward and three steps back. The sheer amount of deadzones in Kukoos will frustrate players simply because folks will spend more time waiting on loading screens because of one wrong input rather than mild forgiveness.
Throughout my review period, I was torn on whether or not I should call Kukoos a true 3D-platformer. While the levels themselves were technically 3D, the fixed camera limited my ability to move about the world and understand my position within it, meaning it felt like my movement was confined to a 2.5D space instead of a 3D space. Sure, the camera would automatically move to a slightly optimal position depending on my circumstances, such as top-down in chase sequences, side-views for some boss battles, and isometric perspectives for some platforming sequences. However, the lack of freedom in moving the camera made it more difficult to gauge depth, distance, and safe zones. That, combined with the number of dead zones/bottomless pits, made some levels incredibly frustrating. Playing on the Switch’s handheld mode didn’t do me any favors, either, as the shadow indicators I would use to gauge my position in relation to a platform under me would often disappear or blend with the environments themselves. I would have liked the freedom to adjust the camera in some sections, as it would have made some of the platforming portions less annoying and more tests of skill/timing.
The levels’ designs were heavily fantastical and toonish, spanning ancient ruins to a cityscape to a candyland full of gumdrops and whipped cream. Not once did I feel like the designs felt copied/pasted or even worse, too busy. Platforming levels require players’ keen eyes for mastery of timing and precision, and too many on-screen graphical elements at once can strain the eyes. Luckily, this was never the case in my playthrough.
Each of the worlds in Kukoos give your character access to a unique ability thanks to a pet, and I’m mostly pleased with how these pets and their abilities function. For instance, one world had me permanently carry around a heavy block that prevented me from jumping high. When pressing the R trigger, the block would be thrown forward and turn into a platform, giving me access to higher areas and gaps I wouldn’t usually have been able to jump across. The platform could also be used to swing around like Spiderman and even ground-pound. In one level, slamming glass with the block would give me access to areas that would have otherwise been out-of-bounds. The catch with these abilities is that they’re world-restricted, meaning that you can’t take these abilities on your adventure and test your dexterity in chaining abilities together. Personally, I would have liked these abilities/pets to build on each other and slightly increasing the platforming difficulty. The current situation of abilities isolates mechanics rather than builds for them. But, I do appreciate that each ability can be used for combat and traversal.
Boss battles are a gameplay staple of the platforming genre, taking place at the end of each world and usually testing once’s mastery of the game thus far. In Kukoos, boss battles usually involved me using the world-specific ability in multiple fashions, testing my knowledge and mastery of the current ability proper. Boss attacks are mildly telegraphed, and most won’t use cheap attacks that will kill you in one hit. If anything, struggling during boss battles will be a result of walking off of a platform instead of failing to dodge/parry attacks. For the most part, I enjoyed these boss battles, and I was sad that there were so few. Minibosses would have been a nice touch to break up the levels’ cadence with additional combat sequences. My other concern about these bosses is, for the most part, they seem to randomly emerge out of the game as opposed to being tied to the theme of the world. For instance, the piranha boss seemed to merely exist without any reference in the world’s previous levels or in the cutscene at the start of the first level in that world. Tying each boss together would make the story (that the game is light on) more evident.
Kukoos is quite a charming game overall, be it the designs of the Kukoos themselves to the enemies and overall environments. I would personally describe the Kukoos (the characters you can choose to play) as Fall Guys meets Crash Bandicoot, minus Crash’s crass humor. Each pet make your characters more charming — I never thought a crab that transforms into a hat that can also create a vacuum to spit out projectiles could be so cute. And it works. My only complaint, if you will, is that I wish that the characters you could play had more uniqueness. I swapped between characters often, and it seemed the only differences between the characters was the voice actors’ grunts/celebrations. The Kukoos themselves successfully tap into charming behaviors, and I can’t help but want more as I play.
If you’re a completionist like me, you’re going to enjoy that every level has three measures of completion beyond “reach the goal.” Every level contains a minimum number of coins to collect, “fwends” to find, and pets to free from the collars that bind them to bad behaviors. Finding “fwends” is not a chore, but it’s definitely not something that can be done passively as you get from point A to point B. Luckily, you’re alerted by “fwends” presence through the use of subtle audio cues, so if you listen carefully, you’ll know if a “fwend” is nearby. You’re rewarded for collecting everything by unlocking additional but optional levels, so feel free to explore for a bit!
During my playthrough, I encountered several visual and a select few gameplay bugs that impacted how I played. My heart indicators would occasionally show an incorrect value, leading me to believe that I had more health than I actually had. One boss’ animations seemed to skip and glitch out for several seconds until it corrected itself and reverted back to its typical attack patterns. However, we have been assured that a patch is scheduled for post-launch that targets bugfixes and introduces additional content, too. It’s relieving that more content is in the pipeline, and I’m excited to see what comes from PetitFabrik.
For an indie title, Kukoos: Lost Pets offers players a taste of charming 3D-platforming that has a potential for something much greater in the future, and I’m interested in seeing what more Kukoos has to offer in the future. Its ability-based platforming encourages folks to exercise precision, dexterity, and thoughtfulness, but I can’t help but want more from PetitFabrik’s charming universe that is the Kukoos. Sure, the Switch may not best accommodate precision compared to other platforms, but the platforming proper and successful charm of Kukoos is definitely enough to hold you over this holiday season.
