Teeto did not click right away. The tutorialization seemed to drag, the humor in the writing seemed overly affected, and the visuals were making me feel dizzy. With a few levels under my belt and, crucially, after I adjusted the camera sensitivity down a couple notches, the gameplay and tone of the game started to harmonize, and I fully came around. I started to warm up to the way that it felt to jump and glide around the purposeful layouts of each level, and I shook my head in involuntary amusement at the dumb jokes. I can’t help but appreciate a game that understands and devotes attention to its strengths.
A collect-a-thon with late 90s sensibilities, Teeto is a 3D action platformer imbued with uninhibited personality. While many games have tried to capture the magic of a Spyro or a Banjo-Kazooie through level structure and gameplay, this is the first modern game I’ve played that also captured the cartoony spirit of the era, with bizarre one-off personalities, corny one-liners, and a plot that is fleshed out only enough to be propulsive to the campaign.
The titular Teeto, a round blue blobby creature, is accompanied by an evidently genius inventor and bunny rabbit, Nory. The overall cast is one of caricatures, but Teeto is a silent blank slate for the player to project themselves onto, and Nory is fairly grounded, being the only character that boasts a relatively solid motive and backstory. After creating Teeto in an experiment, Nory tasks the player character with accompanying her to the source of the fiery shadow monsters that plague the planet. The shadows are loosely connected somehow to the disappearance of all human life on Earth as well as the sudden anthropomorphization of everyday machines and objects.
I wouldn’t say that the worldbuilding is consistent or that these plot points are covered and resolved cogently at any point, but the game is better for it. Every moment spent contemplating or analyzing the thin pretext for the gameplay is a moment the player wastes dispossessed of the game’s devoted intention: old-school platforming and collecting.
Teeto has a hub-and-spokes structure: a main world with dimensional doors leading to offshoot levels. The levels are divided into four different clusters sectioned off from one another, and progression is linear, although the levels can all be revisited and many maintain a nonlinear structure.
The game furnishes the player with what I would describe as a complete arsenal for action-adventure. Mobility has the essentials: the player has a jump and a double jump, and holding the jump button has the nicely intuitive effect of deploying a glider. Teeto will grab a ledge when coming up a little short, and there is also a generous and satisfying dodge roll.
This is not a game I would describe as difficult, but bosses had some tricky moments, and platforming sections varied in their required precision. Frequent checkpointing eliminated a great deal of the pain of failure, and every challenge was obliging and learnable. I would say that Teeto is above all a playground, where players have choices about what and how much to do as well as which items to forgo, but with enough required pursuits to keep exploration from feeling vacuous.
For combat and interaction, there is a simple spin attack and a ground pound, which are always available, and a long-range blaster, which is available as long as you are in your natural form. Ah, that’s right—Teeto can change form. Through the power of Nory’s unintelligible technology, Teeto has been designed to both resist the shadow enemies and to “absorb the characteristics of certain objects” in order to use new abilities: basically, Kirby-style. These abilities allow the player to interact with enemies and the environment by deploying various useful gimmicks, like the ability to breathe fire, which can be deployed against both enemies and the landscape surrounding Teeto, or a flower ability, which covers them in flowers and bestows a grapple mechanic. Or you can also obtain the power of cardboard, which allows Teeto to become and create everyone’s go-to choice of packaging. These are elements we all agree have equal utility.
Taking stock of the available collectables, it would be hard not to assume that this game has taken some notes from the recent PS5 hit Astro Bot. There are the required MacGuffins (called Vionites) necessary to progress to different stages, and there are also overly abundant sparkly stars everywhere that can be gathered to purchase cosmetics for Teeto, but the objectively best collectibles in the game are the Michaels, presenting further irrefutable evidence of the durable appeal of collecting a bunch of little guys.
The conceit of the Michaels is that Nory’s previous experiment, Michael, shattered into many tiny Michael pieces, each with a different personality or physical characteristic, and they were scattered about the world. On your journey you might come across Cool Michael, Business Michael, or Emotionally Unavailable Michael: Michaels of that sort. I am a little surprised at how susceptible I am to this incentive: the curiosity to know what the next little blue guy would be like got me going far out of my way into precarious situations. A Michael is its own reward. I haven’t thought enough about what makes for a good incentive that isn’t at all mechanical. Something to meditate on.
The visuals pop with bright colors, and the shapes are deliberately polygonal, honoring the game’s heritage and making the world into a cheery, boxy playground. The music consists of muted loops and simple digital instrumentation. The sound diffuses into the background, but it carries a joyous and energetic quality that mingles nostalgically with the jolly aesthetic.
The voice actors also take huge swings with their performances, and they are just ridiculous enough to work. Every NPC is entertaining and memorable by virtue of being bombastic or just strange, and whatever else you might say about the dialogue as a whole, the voice performances are never boring. Many accents and tenors are there to deliver campy quips in a way that I find increasingly enjoyable.
For anyone seeking a callback to not just the gameplay but also the idiosyncrasies of 3D platformers of old, this game hits the mark and more than I expected. I am won over. It’s a game that remembers when video games were made to be toys, and at its heart it’s about being a little guy that likes to jump around.
