Review: Here Comes Niko! is a fun little platformer that doesn’t punish you for lacking in parkour skills

Here Comes Niko! Isn’t a game that was on my radar before, but it was included in one of the Humble Bundles that we picked up last year. I was taken in by all the bright colors and the cute, hand-drawn style art. 

It’s not an old game by any means, but it did come out in 2021, so I’m not sure how long it would have taken to cross my radar if it hadn’t been included in the bundle.

And just to take an aside, really quick, if you’re not familiar with Humble Bundle, you should definitely hop on that. They don’t always have cozy gaming bundles, but when they do, you get an insane amount of value. 

Disclaimer: I’ve linked it above and to be fully transparent, that’s our affiliate code, so if you use it, we may get a small kickback from it. 

Gameplay and Controls

When you open up Here Comes Niko! you’re thrown into an interesting blend of 3D environment and 2D characters. You start on your home island which is simply your apartment building, a small train station, and sunken buildings with a crane in the distance. It sounds dystopian, but it’s just normal life on the island. (And every island that follows.)

This game is a heavy platformer, but it’s not designed with challenge in mind. Every time you fall off something, there’s generally a way to get back up easily, whether it be specifically placed air vents or large umbrellas to bounce off of. There are no timed challenges and no deaths, so you can jump around to your heart’s content without suffering repercussions.

You play as Niko, a character that needs a change of pace and to get out of town. There are some light hints throughout the game that your character is non-binary and that your parents (especially your mother) aren’t accepting of this fact. You find a bunch of hidden messages that talk about how you feel lost and correspondence with a friend who refers to you as “they”. There are also some cutscenes with phone calls from home that ask why you can’t be “normal.” 

It’s a heavy subject, but that’s not the focus of the game. So, don’t worry if you’re looking for a lighter mood because Here Comes Niko! is still very much a fun, happy game. 

When you leave home – on a train whose tracks span out into the ocean – you meet Pepper, a frog that wants to offer you a job as a Professional Friend, but you have to pass a trial period first. You’ll hop from various islands helping the citizens and playing a series of small mini-games. 

One citizen wants you to act as his fishing hook to catch fish for him, another wants you to bring her 30 bugs to devour, and others want to trade cassettes that you find around islands in exchange for coins, etc. 

While you’re helping citizens, you’ll come across the aforementioned cassettes, messages in a bottle, bugs, and even apples that pop randomly from bushes when you run through them.

This game sits at about an 8-hour playthrough, perhaps 10 if you want to get 100% completion, so it’s a decent slice of time to run around this charming atmosphere.

As for controls, I think the keys are mapped differently than a standard Xbox configuration. I could be wrong, but I’m used to the ‘A’ button being what you hit to accept things or move the text bar, but in this game, it’s ‘B’ and you can’t remap them.

After checking with my husband, it seems that the controls follow a Nintendo Switch mapping, which makes sense since it was ported to that console.

Ultimately, it didn’t harm anything, it’s just something to be mindful of. Either way, the controls didn’t have issues. There were some glitches, but I will mention more on that below in the cons.

Art and Sound

The art is probably the most notable aspect of Here Comes Niko! The environment is a 3D landscape – though there are some 2D elements like seashells stuck flat to the ground – mixed with 2D sprites. It’s kind of fun to watch the characters spin when you twirl the camera angle.

I found all the designs for the citizens to be really cute and, curiously, you’re the only human running around. I think there’s a lot of charm in the sprite designs having messy outlines, lending it further to that hand-drawn feel. 

Music, unfortunately, was a bit of a miss for me. While the music was fun and upbeat, it wasn’t really long enough. So, there were only so many times it could loop before it became a distraction. 

I’ll be honest and say that I turned the music off during the first island and forgot to check if the music changed from place to place. But, I have a feeling that they likely suffered from the same issues, if they were different.

Happily, this worked out fine because the sound design was great. Getting to run around an island listening to the sound of the waves and the caw of seagulls was a much more relaxing and immersive experience. 

The only time the sound really failed was when the character would go through an area that would normally have a lot of echo, like a tunnel. They clearly tried to rise up to realism, but it was extremely jarring to have everything calm and then to run into a tunnel only to be blasted to Pluto because the sound tripled in volume. 

You can withstand it if you expect it, but, boy, is it offputting. Luckily, there are only two areas that do this and you don’t have to spend a lot of time in them.

Coziness and Cons

The coziness level was definitely high. If you’ve read my reviews before, then you know I’m a heavy lover of fetch quests. I’m the golden retriever of gamers. You send me out and I’ll come back with what you need. Here Comes Niko! is designed for players like me. 

The art style, the multitude of frogs, and being able to run around freely created a really cozy scenario to sink into. 

Unfortunately, there are some cons and it all comes down to glitches. None of them made the game unplayable, but one of them was a minor inconvenience. So, let’s start with the one that actually interfered with gameplay.

Scattered throughout the islands are boxes and you can pretty much run through and jump on them without any issue. The problem comes when they are stacked on top of each other. If you jump onto a stack of boxes, then the chances are high that you’re going to get flung around the map. Luckily, there aren’t many stacks like this, but it can be frustrating.

The second glitch is a little weird. There is a mini-game involving a little arcade machine. When you jump into it, you’re popped into a little world inside the cabinet that’s clearly glitching. All the art choices make it clear that it’s part of the design. So, when the character got stuck walking, at times, I figured that it was just part of the design. Except that there was at least once outside of this mini-game that my character stalled in the same way.

This doesn’t keep you from moving. Generally, you can just jump and continue walking, but it’s worth noting.

The last glitch is all purely visual. In Salmon Creek, I don’t know what I did that inspired all of the tree trunks to blip out of existence, but it was certainly interesting to walk past floating bushes. Except, it didn’t stop at bushes. There were fences and houses that decided to peace out as well. Leaving the island and coming back certainly fixed that, but it was weird.

That particular glitch only happened once, but, interestingly, the trees seem to inspire anarchy. In the pool area, the trees would get almost wibbly-wobbly around the edges in a reddish color. It was like it was bleeding in from the interaction with the frog detective. When you talk to the stack of frogs in a trench coat, the visuals go red and stop when the interaction is done. The trees in question were in this same area.

The last place the trees continued their chaos was in the bathhouse island. It’s a snowy landscape at night with a bunch of pine trees – pine trees that refused to properly blend. When you spin your camera, you can see white edges around them almost as if they hadn’t been clipped properly.

Mind, none of these broke the game. But, it did seem a little like the further you got into the game, the more visual glitches got overlooked.

I did run into some issues with lag in Salmon Creek where a lot of apples or bugs were, but I really couldn’t tell if that was the game or my dinosaur computer, so take that one with a grain of salt.

Here Comes Niko! Verdict

Visual glitches aside, Here Comes Niko! is a very fun, relaxing game. I had immense amounts of fun searching out the hidden things and talking to a frog only for it to hit on me. (That’s a fun little achievement – find all the frogs that turn into ‘handsome frogs’ and deliver a terrible pickup line.) 

The game is only about 10 hours long if you’re a completionist, but it still ended up being a lot more content than I had expected when I first opened it. So, that was a pleasant surprise.

If you’re looking for a fun platformer without any of the usual stress and you enjoy bright colors and frogs, then I think you’ll love Here Comes Niko!.

Here Comes Niko! is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch for $24.99. I don’t normally comment on price, but I’d wait for a sale, $24.99 seems a touch steep for the game, lovely as it is.

If you’re not much of a platformer, but you want a place to just run around and do fetch quests, then you should check out our review for Smushi Come Home, I will never be able to recommend that gem of a game enough.