Sticky Feet lets you climb everywhere, then teaches the hunter where you hide

You are a house gecko in a rotting bayou trailer, and the verbs are climb, cling, hide, distract and slip past. Walls, ceilings, the back of a cabinet, the underside of the kitchen table — all of it is ground. Somewhere in the same trailer there is a friend shut inside the fridge, and getting them out is the job.

The unusual part is that climbing is not a move here, it is the default state of moving. Most games that let you go up a wall gate it behind a marked ledge, a ladder or a stripe of yellow paint, because the designer needs to know which way you will approach a room. Sticky Feet gives that up. The room becomes one continuous surface, and the interesting geography stops being the floor plan and starts being the space behind, above and underneath everything in it.

The other half of the design is grandma. She is not a patrol on a loop who forgets you the moment a meter drains. She adapts to your hiding places and comes looking, which turns a good nook from a safe spot into a resource that gets used up. The first time under the sink is free. The fourth time is a decision.

And you cannot fight her. You are small, fragile and, in the developer’s own framing, the most hunted thing in the house. Every tool you have is really about attention — where hers is, what moved it, and how long you have before it comes back.

How Snake Pass Became a Platformer Without Jumping argues that removing a genre’s most familiar verb is what makes a game new: Snake Pass wears the costume of a 3D platformer, deletes the jump, and pushes all of the difficulty into grip and coil. Sticky Feet does the mirror image — it does not remove a verb, it makes one universal — but the accounting is identical. Once every surface is reachable, the difficulty has to be re-hidden somewhere, and here it is hidden in the thing chasing you rather than in the wall.

How Stealth Game Guards See and Hear is about the machinery underneath a guard — simulated sight and hearing — and argues that how much of that machinery you show the player is what decides whether stealth feels tense or tactical. A trailer is a hard room to do that in. There are no long corridors to read and no clean sightlines to plan against, and a climbing player adds a vertical axis that most stealth opponents are never built to check. Whether grandma looks up, and whether you can tell in advance that she might, is close to the whole game.

What Makes Good AI? is the essay that worries me on this game’s behalf. Its claim is that enemies feel smart when they are legible, consistent and quietly generous, not when they are genuinely clever. An opponent who learns your hiding places is the hardest possible case for that rule. If the learning happens off-screen, being caught in a spot that worked ten minutes ago reads as the game cheating rather than as the game paying attention. The fix is showmanship: she has to be seen checking the shelf you used last time, before she finds you on it.

Sticky Feet is by KepperSnapper, self-published, coming to Windows with no date announced, listed under Action, Adventure and Indie. The store page says plainly that the images are work in progress, which is the honest version of an early page and worth more than a polished one that hides the stage it is at.

The options list is worth reading as a design statement. Single-player, save anytime, adjustable difficulty, playable without timed input, and a camera comfort setting — that last one matters more than usual in a game that spends its time upside down on a ceiling. A stealth game that strips out reflex checks is telling you where it thinks the tension lives, and it is not in your hands.

If the draw is the lizard rather than the horror, MECCHA CHAMELEON is the sibling worth clicking — another reptile in a stealth game that refuses to hand you a visibility number, and makes staying unseen something you physically pull off instead of a stat you keep low.