From Brazilian developers PetitFabrik comes Kukoos: Lost Pets, a 3-D action platform. As you battle to save your pets that have fallen under the control of a giant Frog using a mind-control collar. You must traverse different levels to try and save Kukoos and the mind-controlled pets.
Kukoos: Lost Pets (Early Access)
Developed by PetitFabrik
Gameplay
Kukoos: Lost Pets starts you off with the basic tutorial on actions and activating your pet’s abilities. Getting past the tutorial can be challenging as the instructions are vague, and the camera angle can be your biggest enemy. The game starts weeding out those who thought it might be a fun clone of Mario, Raymond, or Crash.
After the tutorial, you start your journey by traveling through different zones through a portal Granny opens up using a particular flower you pick up in each level. Each level has challenges and goals that lead to collecting stars that you need to progress to the next chapter.
As you embark beyond the tutorial, the most significant flaws start appearing. Not being able to customize the controls is one of the biggest gripes. With the variety of pet abilities, you use for each chapter, not being able to customize the layout can cause an easy accidental button press.
As you travel through each level in Kukoos, you need to explore to find the flowers and coins but risk falling off the stage and dying. To make it worse, determining if the area has a sudden death is the camera’s positioning. Not having a more comprehensive range of continue points prevents finding all the flowers and coins for that level.
These issues make some of the boss battles much harder than intended. During one, in particular, it was difficult to determine the direction of the attack as the indication looked identical for either the higher or lower one. It took multiple attempts to learn the attack pattern to get past it.
Not all is lost
Kukoos does have some redeeming qualities. The design of the characters, levels, and pets bring a colorful combination of colors and personality. The levels are all different, and you get a new pet. Many of the levels built around the theme bring a replay value that others didn’t.
The most considerable saving grace for the game is the pets themselves. These are the true gem and reasons to play it, from their design to abilities. One is a square rock looking thing and can be used as a platform or a pile driver. It feels at times that PetiFrabrik designed the pet first and the level around it.
Final Thoughts on Kukoos: Lost Pets
Kukoos: Lost Pets is an enigma of a game. At times I love everything about it, and other times I want to rage quit and uninstall it. For everything the developers did great, they had something equally bad done to counter it. Games like this have been fixed with updates, like No Man’s Sky and recently CyberPunk 2099. Yet those had the advantage of being open-world games and not a platformer.