This is like election night at Dana Gould’s house.

While hanging out with a couple friends on Discord, an intrusive thought skittered into my mind and laid eggs: wouldn’t it be funny to throw a stream up only for it to be Gex: Enter the Gecko? Ha! Great idea! We point and laugh at the unfunny green lizard for a little while. And then keep playing it. And then do a bonus level. And then get to the next area because you only ever played the N64 version on a 3 day rental back in the day and are a bit curious as to what the fuller PS1 version’s hub looks like. And then keep playing it the next day. And then get pissed that you need 33 remotes to fight Rez despite needing 26 to get to the area of the hub with the portal to that fight. And then keep playing it a couple days later. And fucking…beat a Gex game? God help me, my inability to not commit to the bit is going to get me killed someday.

It’s almost impossible to discuss G:EtG on its own merits. Which it does have, to be clear! Games like this rarely sold as well as they did for no good reason back in the day, especially when we were so thoroughly inundated with 3D platformers that were almost all crap, with or without the benefit of hindsight. This game is not crap, but it does its absolute best to convince you it is. Its embracement of trash is complete and total, with no regard for the garbage juice dripping like a mid-brew coffee pot, hastening with each squeeze. Trash TV, trash writing, trash design: it’s all there, an endless deluge of refuse like garbage bag-shaped tears in rain. What people forget is that this was Crystal Dynamics at arguably the height of their powers. You like Soul Reaver? That’s the house that Gex built. No not Tomb Raider, they didn’t actually make that, it’s complicated. My point is there’s an undeniably solid mechanical foundation here, and I’m gonna focus on it for a bit because A) it deserves it and B) I need to talk about something positive before addressing the yappy lizard in the room.

Gex is a relatively simple character for the time, closer to the likes of Crash 2 in terms of available moves. Run, jump, bounce for extra height, tail slap, kung fu kick that the game basically never requires you use until endgame, and a context sensitive crawl that I’ll talk more about in a minute. That’s it! His kit is about as stock as they come but it’s incredibly responsive. I have played a lot of 5th gen platformers y’all, and it was as shocking to me as it likely was to everyone else that Gex controls better than the vast majority of the field. Moment to moment hop’n’bop is intuitive, with hitboxes that always feel the right amount of generous and platforms that rarely require you to perform the traditional PS1 camera wrangling before feeling confident and taking the leap.

That last bit is important. Cameras weren’t really figured out until 6th gen, and frankly even that’s debatable, but Gex benefitted from coming out in 1998 and took a lot of lessons from everything that preceded it. The game offers 3 settings: full auto, semi auto, and manual. Semi is the default and honestly works quite well, with most of the preset angles being usable without even tapping L1/R1. It’s not perfect, no 5th gen camera is, and you will often hear the game’s “you can’t move the camera right now ya dingus!” honk, but not so often that it’s disastrous. I did swap to manual in the game’s back third as its levels became 70% death pit by volume, but I probably could have gotten on without.

Level design! Enter the Gecko has it! It’s fine! Most of the levels take after Mario 64, and not just because you hop into TVs depicting them in the hub. They tend to be wide open and contain multiple remotes (stars) that require you achieve different objectives on revisits. Given the simplicity of Gex‘s moveset you’d be forgiven for thinking there isn’t a lot of room for creativity, and…honestly yeah there’s a fair bit of repetition, but they do a good enough job at ratcheting up the difficulty that I was rarely bored. The level themes being repeated multiple times is a downer when compared to the other Mario wannabes of the 90’s, but they are bespoke levels with meaningful mechanical differences. Given that you’ll have to get the vast majority of the red remotes just to fight Rez (which features the best track in the game by the way) I think this could’ve gone far worse! The game plays alright!

You know what the secret sauce is, though? It’s that aforementioned crawl. The game tells you “you can climb some walls” early on and just leaves you to experiment. That translates to always keeping an eye out for walls with different textures, which is more fun than it sounds I swear. Gex becomes twice as responsive while on a wall, and I think he moves a bit faster but that might just be animation trickery. Clambering across walls and ceilings allows for some genuinely compelling level design as you look for safe spots to drop from, ideally full of collectibles, which makes it all the more disappointing that each level has maybe one dedicated crawl section. This feels like the best argument Crystal Dynamics had for Gex‘s jump to 3D, and to their credit it’s a good one, but it’s potential is wildly underutilized in favor of far more generic moment to moment gameplay.

Time for the other shoe to drop. I can’t pretend Gex isn’t Gex any longer. The series’ big identifying feature was Gex himself, and as one Jeff Gerstmann said way back when, you kind of feel obligated to not turn his chatter off despite being permitted to do so. The Authentic Gex Experience demands Dana Gould whisper sweet nothings into your ear for about 6 hours, and It! Is! Excruciating!

I don’t claim to know what Crystal Dynamics was going for with this character. I never really did, even when I rented this way back when. A third of his jokes are some variation of “this is like [RANDOM EVENT] at [RANDOM CELEBRITY]’s house!”, and almost none of them make any amount of sense. Taco Night at James Earl Jones’? What the fuck? What does that mean, dude? Why are you saying these words in this order? What did Richard Simmons and David Hasselhoff do to you? Are you having a several hour long stroke?

What I do have is a theory. I think G:EtG was an attempt at a proto-Shrek, and not just because it’s obsessed with Hollywood. Kids love a mascot, but they also love being treated like sentient human beings, and sentient human beings love being in on a joke. Doesn’t matter if the joke doesn’t make any goddamn sense, they’re getting winked at and nudged, they feel included! To continue the “it’s like that other green guy” comparison, I think the constant nods are more for the parents overhearing it from the next room. Worst case it’ll be equally annoying as any amount of muffled bing bing wahoos, but best case? Genuine interest! Maybe they’ll play it after the kids go to bed! Maybe they’ll buy them a Gex sequel for Christmas instead of the newest Gwimbly game because they’ll remember the gecko, for better or worse! The goal was never to write something great, it was to worm its way into your memory no matter the cost, and by god it does work.

A lot of these jokes had aged poorly by the time the game was pressed onto discs. I was curious to see if time’s cruel march created enough distance to make ironic enjoyment a realistic possibility, and…honestly, kinda? A little bit? He’s still terminally unfunny, don’t get me wrong, but now we’ve looped back around to problematic uncle and there’s something inherently comedic there. Not the contemporary extremely online Facebook variety with holes in his brain, the kind who’s never used the internet and became a walking time capsule that’s mostly harmless but occasionally blindsides you. He’s not full on dropping slurs, he knows better than that because he doesn’t hear those on cable anymore, but expect an occasional gay joke and a Chinese voice so stereotypical it’d be subtitled in Wonton font. The key difference between this hypothetical uncle and this very real cartoon gecko is that I am not related to Gex, have no emotional investment in steering him towards modern societal norms, and he will keep doing it no matter how much I beg him to stop.

My biggest takeaway from this entire experience is that the long-delayed Gex trilogy remaster can only end in disaster. If they just sell it as an UpRez’d Edition or whatever with no notable alterations it’s going to get Limited Run reamed by everyone with good taste the moment they reach the Kung-Fu Theatre or pick up a firefly and hear “I’m flaming!…in a manly way” for the third time. If they make another pass on his dialogue – and they probably could, what else is Dana Gould doing these days besides riffing in a Planet of the Apes mask? – a ton of internet losers are going to sternly inform them that Gex was their most favoritest game ever but now it’s woke and ruined because its racism ratios are all out of whack. Dragging Gex kicking and quipping into the 2020s is a true no-win scenario for all involved. It’s not a terrible game, far from it if I’m being fair, but anybody who calls it their favorite is as reliable as a polygraph test at Steven Seagal’s house.

6/10