In Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island, the Greek gods are queer and kind

Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is like a lot of the games I’m most likely to pick up. It’s got a soothing, whitewashed color palette. The characters seem to be queer. And the gameplay includes a lot of environmental puzzles and jogging around, picking stuff up. It’s perfect for me. But by those metrics, so are a lot of games. So I expected some genre familiarity when I booted it up for the first time. But in reality, Mythwrecked is a breath of fresh air for the genre of chill, cozy role-playing games.

Developed by Polygon Treehouse (no relation) and published by Whitethorn Games, Mythwrecked puts the player in the position of Alex, who gets shipwrecked on a mysterious island that’s inexplicably home to a handful of Greek gods who have no idea who they are or what they’re doing there. While it’s clear that Alex is motivated to get home at first, as she starts running into gods like Hermes, Zeus, Hera, and Aphrodite, she becomes dedicated to helping them recover their memories by doing them favors and finding their lost mementos around the island.

With each round of completed favors and returned items, Alex becomes better friends with the gods — who are generally painted in quite a generous light — and she learns more about how they forgot everything about themselves.

It’s always fun to see a new retelling of Greek myths, especially when that retelling makes Athena nonbinary, turtlenecked, and blue-haired; Aphrodite short and curvy; and Hephaestus jacked, red-headed, and using a wheelchair. But the fun of Mythwrecked isn’t just in the story, which smartly has an end point when you get to level 3 for each of the eight gods. It’s also in the game mechanics — a huge reason it broke through the piles of cozy games I’ve played recently.

Each god gives you a powerful object you can use to restore the island’s lights, windmills, and statues, delightfully complicated by environmental puzzles and locked doors. Beeping radar leads you to buried and hidden mementos; it’s up to you to sort out which god the memento belongs to, either using your real-life knowledge of these gods, or by getting a clue from the talking statue on the island.

The gameplay might be too simplistic or repetitive for a game that goes on for tens of hours, but Mythwrecked doesn’t overstay its welcome — in fact, perhaps the opposite. (Lately I’ve been moseying around the island, collecting ambrosia fruit, just to play a little longer.) Each progression of the story is meaningfully linked to the puzzles you solved, and the game ultimately ends after about 10 hours of play, if you don’t dilly-dally like I’ve been doing. It’s just a good stand-alone game you can crush in a weekend — a subgenre of games I really value in the days of infinitely playable AAA games. Even some cozy games demand hundreds of hours of my time, and I often give it to them, willingly. But Mythwrecked is just as long as its story requires — with a little extra room for godly shenanigans, like any good Greek myth.

Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island is now available on Nintendo Switch, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC and ROG Ally X using a download code provided by Whitethorn Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.