Experience the Heartfelt Magic of Lil Gator Game — A Must-Play Gem
Breath of the Park
Lil Gator Game’s announcement trailer (in last summer’s Nintendo Direct) failed to sell the game to me. The game’s action looked fun enough, almost like a junior version of Breath of the Wild. After all, Zelda references were everywhere — the Lil Gator was wearing a pointy green hat, he flew using a kite identical to Link’s, he surfed down hills on a shield — he smashed pots with a wooden sword. As the trailer neared its end, I thought, ‘Fine—I’m sure my six year old nephew would enjoy this game, but it’s not for me.’ Nothing else in the video —the shots of the Lil Gator meeting various different animals around the park, the shots of him climbing mountains, the shots of the island locations — campsites, bridges, some kind of radio tower — made me change my mind. The game seemed ‘lite’ and silly.
It’s a shame, because I was so wrong. Lil Gator Game is kind of beautiful, and it seems to be aimed not at kids, but as keenly as an arrow from Link’s bow directly at adults with nostalgic memories of their own childhood.
As soon as I pressed start, Lil Gator Game unbalanced me. The Lil Gator — he was lying down beside the menu screen just out of sight— sits up and announces he wants to do something fun. He’s intense and in your face like a kid who hasn’t quite learnt how to respect boundaries. He says without any doubt that his big sis will play with him — and then, just like that, you’re in control of the Lil Gator, exploring a little playground with rocking sea-horses and a climbing frame, looking for her. As you jump on one of the rocking horses, a speech bubble pops up beside the Lil Gator’s head — ‘Wheeee!’ he says playfully, full of confidence. Next he jumps on a seesaw, and starts tiptoeing along the flat surface with the kind of satisfying snap that you’d expect from a 3D Mario game. ‘Oh no! The ground is lava! Aaaaa!’
Throughout the game the Lil Gator’s characterisation— child-like earnestness personified — feels less like cutesy mawkishness and more as a setup for a tragedy. He’s a little bit too sure in himself and that everyone is going to want to continue playing his games forever — that growing up is nothing but a myth. I didn’t realise when I started, but I was being skilfully manipulated by a game with lofty storytelling ambitions that it ultimately achieves to the highest possible standard. Very quickly the game’s central premise kicks in: the Lil Gator’s big sister is visiting from college, but she has too much work to do, and has no time to play the Zelda-style fantasy roleplay games they used to play together. When you find ‘big sis=’, a sense of nostalgia is whipped up through a montage of their past life together and all the fun they used to have not so long ago — the kind of nostalgia only recognisable to people who are explicitly not kids anymore.
In characteristic fashion, the Lil Gator picks himself up from this briefest setback and decides to embark on a quest. With his best friends — a frog, a horse, a dog — he had already prepared pots and cardboard enemies in preparation for playing games with his sister. Now he decides rather than give up he’ll go bigger. He’ll have so much fun around her — by playing the most epic version of their previous games, and by encouraging as many other animals to play as possible — that his sister won’t be able to stop herself from joining in. Plan made, he hops on the spot as if he can’t wait to get going.
The next five to six hours of gameplay — Lil Gator Game is a bite-sized delight — takes the Lil Gator on a journey full of appealing interactions with fifty or sixty other animals, young and old, who populate the island national park setting. All of them exist in their own relatable life moments. I loved the reindeer on a school science project who played along with the lil gator’s Zelda-esque roleplaying, or the group of high-school cool kids over by the water park, who, when they were together seemed sarcastic and aloof, but when they were separated opened up and revealed more and more of their diverse and complicated personas. I loved Duke, the at-first-monosyllabic duck. The lil gator forces him into a pretend court case to see why he is so teenagery and unresponsive. Under scrutiny Duke slowly cracks, and reveals his fears about fitting in with the rest of his gang.
Every animal you meet is written like this — with relatability and wit — and the more time you spend interacting with them, the more the game wraps you up in its joyful arms and pulls you deeper into its themes. I’m not going to go into any more examples, because to do so would diminish some of the purest gaming pleasure I’ve ever had. I’ll only say that the interactions as a whole give Lil Gator Game a truly universal appeal, similar to a Donut County or a Katamari Damacy — but, with much more heart.
For this review, I delved back into the game a couple of months after finishing it, and even though I had been playing Tears of the Kingdom, the highest possible bar with which to compare Lil Gator Game, I was instantly impressed all over again. Lil Gator Game is more than a more playful clone of Breath of the Wild. No—it’s a glorious all-in meta pastiche on the original Switch Zelda, with the exact same emphasis on giving its players complete freedom to explore. The way the Lil Gator navigates his island world is the same way Link navigates Hyrule— you can climb anything you see as long as you have the stamina, you glide with delightfully wiggling feet, you battle cardboard enemies with an assortment of collectable weapons and projectiles. In some ways Lil Gator Game’s movement is more free. Realism has been stripped away so there’ll be no rainfall washing you away while you’re halfway up a cliff. And the Lil Gator is an alligator, so where Link, loaded by all his armour and swords risks drowning, the Lil Gator glides through water like a bird cuts through air. The Lil Gator also has moves that Link could only dream of: did I mention he could ragdoll collapse in a heap? No? Well, he can. It’s a funny bit of slapstick humour — and completely useless — but it was heart-warming seeing the Lil Gator, grinning with amusement, swing his arms back and fall down a hill.
It all feels so well-honed and enjoyable. I loved the time I hilariously rag-doll collapsed off a lakeside pier, swam through the water with the grace of an amphibian, and then launched into the air with a mouthful of bubble-gum. I popped the gum, glided to the side of a mountain, launched off the cliff face, and then, using my paraglider, swooped back to solid ground where I talked to a bull beside a lake who was embarrassed that his fur might get ‘floofy’ if he got in the water. The bull’s main concern was impressing a nearby sheep he wanted to make friends with, and he was worried he’d look foolish and ruin his chances of making a new buddy. Lil Gator Game’s storytelling ambitions reach an impressive climax, revealing a poignant narrative that I won’t spoil any more. I’ll only say that it’s worth your time. Elsewhere, the game is held together by its impressive production values. The visuals are colourful and full of life, and the music is packed with ear-worm inducing tunes.
Lil Gator Game is such a wonderful evocation of a very specific and futile childhood perspective, of still believing it’s possible to defy the passage of time, that I could imagine MegaWobble transferring their skills onto other life moments too. Somewhere down the line, I’d love to see more — Teen Gator Game, 20s Gator Game, Middle-Aged Gator Game. Whatever they choose to do they’ve hit this debut out of the park.
