Games Like Gex: Enter the Gecko

Games Similar to Gex: Enter the Gecko

Gex: Enter the Gecko is a PlayStation-era 3D collectathon platformer that stands out for its sharp pop-culture parody, TV-themed world-hopping, and the sheer physical joy of controlling a gecko who sticks to walls, whips enemies with his tail, and delivers one-liners at a pace that would exhaust a late-night host. If you loved navigating Rez’s twisted media-landscape levels, hunting down remotes, and laughing at the relentless cultural send-ups, you’re after a very specific cocktail: 3D platforming with personality, collectibles that matter, and worlds that feel distinct and weird. The games below nail at least two of those three qualities and most hit all of them.

Top Games for Fans of Gex: Enter the Gecko

Crash Bandicoot: Warped

PlayStation | 1998

Released the same year as Enter the Gecko, Warped is the obvious first stop for anyone who loved Gex’s PlayStation-native brand of 3D platforming. Naughty Dog’s third Crash game shares the same era-defining quality of levels that each feel like a self-contained theme — Egyptian tombs, medieval jousting, underwater temples — a structure that mirrors Gex’s TV-channel conceit almost beat for beat. The gameplay is tighter and more mechanically demanding than Gex’s, with precise jumping, spin attacks, and collectible gems rewarding thorough exploration rather than simple completion. Aku Aku’s protective mask provides the same light narrative glue that Rez does in Gex, a recurring guide figure who keeps the momentum going between worlds. If you finished Enter the Gecko and immediately wanted more PlayStation mascot platforming with a strong sense of humor and kinetic satisfaction, Warped is the next thing you play.

Spyro the Dragon

PlayStation | 1998

Where Crash is tight and linear, Spyro is open and exploratory, making it a perfect companion piece to Gex’s own open-ended level design. Insomniac’s purple dragon debuted the same year as Enter the Gecko and offered a fully 3D world where movement itself — gliding, charging, hovering — felt like the reward. Like Gex’s remote-hunting structure, Spyro tasks you with liberating gems and dragon elders across themed homeworlds and their sub-stages, and the satisfaction of finding every last collectible in a world before moving on is essentially identical to combing Gex’s television landscapes for every last piece of the puzzle. The tone is cheerful and slightly irreverent, the worlds are imaginative, and the moment-to-moment platforming rewards patience and curiosity. Spyro fills the same genre niche as Gex but prioritizes exploration over combat, giving fans a slightly different flavor of the same essential experience.

Banjo-Kazooie

Nintendo 64 | 1998

Rare’s bear-and-bird duo is the gold standard of 1990s 3D collectathon platforming and the benchmark against which every other game in this list, including Gex, should be measured. Banjo-Kazooie shares Enter the Gecko’s love of themed worlds — a haunted mansion, a rustic Click Clock Wood that changes across four seasons, a pirate cove — each packed with jiggies, notes, and Jinjos to track down. The writing is funnier and more sustained than Gex’s one-liner approach; Banjo’s world is populated with memorable characters who mock you, help you, and make the whole adventure feel alive. The moveset is the most expansive of any game in this list, with Kazooie’s abilities unlocked progressively through Bottles the mole, and the sheer physical pleasure of mastering the controls mirrors Gex’s own satisfying wall-crawling and tail-whip mechanics. If Enter the Gecko left you wanting more depth and more personality from your 3D platformer, Banjo-Kazooie delivers on every axis.

Ape Escape

PlayStation | 1999

Ape Escape is the PlayStation’s most inventive 3D platformer and the one that most aggressively commits to a single weird premise — catching escaped monkeys using a variety of gadgets — the same way Gex commits to TV-themed level parody. Where Gex uses pop culture as wallpaper, Ape Escape uses its concept to drive every mechanical decision: the stun club, time net, radar, and RC car are all tools for the catch rather than combat, which makes every encounter feel puzzly and satisfying in a way that’s distinct from other platformers of the era. The PlayStation DualShock controller was actually required for Ape Escape, making it one of the first games to use both analog sticks simultaneously, and the resulting movement feels unusually precise and responsive. Fans of Gex’s variety — different level themes, different tools for different situations — will feel immediately at home, and the monkey personality animation is some of the funniest physical comedy in 1990s gaming.

MediEvil

PlayStation | 1998

MediEvil’s Sir Daniel Fortesque is the alter ego of Gex who never made it into television: a cowardly knight resurrected as a skeleton hero who has to bluff his way through a quest he was never qualified for. The humor is darker and more British than Gex’s pop-culture barrage, but the underlying attitude is identical — a protagonist who is fundamentally unimpressive dealing with a world that expects more from him. Sony Cambridge’s action-platformer fills its worlds with collectible chalices, hidden areas, and enemy variety that rewards returning to levels with new abilities, exactly the kind of completionist loop that Gex fans already know and love. The combat is more involved than Gex’s tail-whip system, with weapons looted from fallen enemies, shields to block attacks, and timed special abilities, adding a layer of strategy that rewards experimentation. The atmosphere and tone make MediEvil feel like the spookier cousin of Gex, and fans of either will find the other immediately approachable.

Earthworm Jim 2

Multiple Platforms | 1995

Earthworm Jim 2 is the spiritual ancestor of Enter the Gecko’s irreverent energy, a 2D platformer so committed to its own absurdist comedy that the game mechanics themselves become the punchline. Levels include protecting bags of puppies, navigating a cow’s intestinal tract, and a section played entirely in slow motion, each one a parody of a game genre or cultural touchstone in the same way Gex parodies specific TV channels. Jim’s moveset — whipping with his own earthworm body, using his head as a helicopter — has the same physical oddity as Gex’s tail attacks and wall-crawling, and both games share a commitment to controls that feel good before anything else. The humor is stranger and more surreal than Gex’s pop-culture references, but the creative DNA is identical: a wisecracking animal mascot in a world that exists to be mocked. For fans who want to understand where Gex’s creative sensibility came from, Earthworm Jim 2 is essential context.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Nintendo 64 | 2001

Rare’s most notorious platformer takes the irreverent animal-mascot formula that Enter the Gecko pioneered and pushes it as far as it can possibly go, with adult humor, movie parodies, and a gleeful contempt for the conventions of the genre that Gex only gestures toward. Conker shares Gex’s love of pop-culture reference — there are sustained parodies of Saving Private Ryan, The Matrix, and Alien — but where Gex delivers these as one-liners, Rare builds entire levels and setpieces around them. The platforming is excellent, the voice acting is superb, and the game is shot through with a satirical awareness of its own genre that makes it feel decades ahead of its time. Fans of Enter the Gecko’s snarky tone will feel like they found the game that took Gex’s best idea and ran it to its logical extreme. It’s sharper, stranger, and more ambitious than anything else on this list.

Donkey Kong 64

Nintendo 64 | 1999

Rare’s other 1999 release is the maximalist endpoint of the collectathon genre Gex: Enter the Gecko represents. Five playable Kongs, each with unique abilities, collecting bananas, coins, blueprints, and crowns across eight enormous worlds — Donkey Kong 64 essentially asks “what if Gex had five times as many collectibles?” and answers enthusiastically. The structure is directly comparable to Enter the Gecko’s remote-hunting loop, with each character able to collect different items in each level, requiring return visits and ability unlocks that give the whole game a satisfying completionist rhythm. The production values are extraordinary for 1999, the boss fights are inventive and often funny, and the sheer variety of what you’re doing at any given moment — platforming, swimming, shooting, driving — mirrors Gex’s own variety of television-themed environments and mechanical conceits. This is the game for Gex fans who want more of everything.

What Makes These Games Similar

The common thread connecting all of these recommendations is a design philosophy that treats personality as a gameplay feature. Gex: Enter the Gecko isn’t primarily interesting because of its mechanics — the tail whip is serviceable, the wall-crawling is fun but not transcendent — it’s interesting because every level makes you feel like you’re inside a specific idea. A horror movie channel, a kung-fu channel, a cartoon channel. The architecture of each world is built around a joke, and the joke pays off over the course of fifteen to twenty minutes of exploration. Every game on this list operates from the same premise: the world you’re moving through has a concept, and that concept is what makes the movement feel worth doing.

The collectathon loop — find the thing, unlock the next area, find more things — is the structural glue that holds all of these games together, but it only works when the things you’re finding feel meaningful in context. Banjo-Kazooie’s jiggies are scattered through worlds that reward curiosity. Ape Escape’s monkeys are hidden in places that make you feel clever for finding them. Gex’s remotes are stashed in corners of television landscapes that reward the player for thinking like someone who knows the genre being parodied. The best 3D platformers of this era understood that collectibles are only satisfying when the world around them earns them.

There is also a tonal coherence across this list that transcends platform or developer. The late 1990s produced a remarkable run of 3D platformers that were simultaneously technically ambitious and narratively irreverent — mascot characters who knew they were mascots, worlds that winked at the player, humor that assumed the audience was in on the joke. Gex sits at the center of that moment, slightly edgier than Spyro, slightly more grounded than Conker, exactly as gleeful as Crash. These games all share a cultural moment as much as a genre, and playing through them in roughly release order is something close to a history of what ambition meant in console platforming at the end of the millennium.

Tips for Getting Started

If you’re coming directly from Gex: Enter the Gecko and want the most familiar experience first, start with Crash Bandicoot: Warped or Spyro the Dragon — both are PlayStation originals from the same year, both have been remastered in the N. Sane Trilogy and Reignited Trilogy respectively, and both will feel immediately comfortable to someone who’s already mastered the basic vocabulary of the era. From there, move to Banjo-Kazooie, which is the genre’s high-water mark and will recalibrate your expectations for what a 3D platformer can do with personality and world design. Save Conker’s Bad Fur Day for last — it works best when you have a full frame of reference for the genre it’s simultaneously celebrating and destroying.

One practical note: most of these games reward completionism but don’t require it. Gex fans who hunt every remote should feel free to do the same in Banjo or DK64, but players who found Gex’s collect-a-thon loop repetitive can safely ignore the completionist layers in Spyro or Crash and still get the full experience. These are games that scale with how much you want to give them, which is exactly the kind of design generosity that makes the 3D platformer genre from this era worth revisiting decades later.