Lil Gator Review

Right up your alley-gator!

Lil Gator ticks the boxes for charm, adventure and goofy humor. Does the game fulfill only a young audience or does it also fulfill enough gameplay for adults?

The Navi-Gator

Lil Gator is a cozy and relaxing platformer (if a short one), accompanied by its brilliantly dorky dialogue.

It delivers a charming and imaginative experience from start to finish, based on the ability to explore and free roam.

The Lil Gator game follows the story of a young alligator and his older sister. There are a lot of flashbacks shown throughout the game in the form of memories of the duo on adventures dotted around the island and within the story.

However, as time passes, the older sister has less time for Lil Gator who I aptly named ‘Gavi’.

And so begins the adventure of our green protagonist working with friends old and new on quests to help enable to bring his sister back to play with him again.

Throughout the game there is definitely a theme to accept your inner child, take a break, and have fun. It’s definitely a lesson that resonates to many of us and is perfectly matched with the game’s deep storyline, despite the adorable characters and general cute aesthetic.

That’s very interesting. Please, do Goron

The main basis of the game is to focus on quests; the end goal being to craft the biggest and best quality adventure for your sister to enjoy with you.

The quests range from defeating enemies and collecting items, to taking down ninjas or throwing bowling ball bombs.

The more characters you make friends with, the more you can upgrade your town.

When it came to upgrading it would indicate how many volunteers are required to finish the job. From exploring the large island, there never seemed to be a shortage of new critters to meet.

It felt very much like a Catan game mixed with Super Paper Mario enemies with many elements of the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

To shield surfing, to gliding around (with a t-shirt), to the stamina wheel, and treasure chests, there are a lot of welcome nods to our green Hylian friend.

Due to the focus being on Lil Gator’s imagination, making references to other games that he’s probably played for many hours, works due to the idea of the world and consequently adds extra realism and hits you in the feels, which is what the writers are aiming for.

Aside from recruiting residents, completing quests will provide you with some useful rewards as well. You will mostly be rewarded with confetti, which is the game’s main currency, but at times you can get new equipment or upgrades for your adventure.

Equipment ranges from new hats including a ‘Pointy Floppy Thing’, a bucket, detective hat and a princess tiara.
Weapons start from a wooden stick, to a sword, nunchucks, laser sword, and a princess wand.

Seems using a giant leaf isn’t just for Totoro, as it’s also a choice of shield, among a plate, a chessboard, garbage can lid, or even a trampoline.

Having a random set-up isn’t just for GTA and the Fortnite players of this world, this lizard wants in too.

At one point, my husband walked in on me playing Lil Gator and asked if I was really an alligator skateboarding with nunchuks whilst wearing a tiara. Why yes, dear husband, I am.

Other features include being able to have the ability to ragdoll (because why not), to unlocking useful perks such as the megaphone to blast out a cry to locate any missing potential critters to add to your army of fun, to a camera, and my most favourite; the text option to contact one of your close friends to locate any missing monsters and treasures.

The completionist in me did 100% the game in about four hours. I’d say just doing the storyline and side quests would take about three hours.

Now before I head to my local bank to deposit my stash of confetti to the bewildered clerk attendant, let’s talk about visuals.

Alligators are jawsome creatures!

One of the best aspects of Lil Gator are the visuals. The colourful orange and brown tones of the forests around the island set in Autumn were beautiful to explore. And climbing the rocky mountains or gliding around the map from the highest points, across the river, and over trees was so relaxing.

I was quite impressed with how big the map actually was. I was as excited as our reptile protagonist to go and explore further from the start of the game that I half expected a 5 star GTA police raid and swat team to come chase me.

However, in keeping with the friendly tone of the game; I was simply told to complete more quests before adventuring further.
Although, the downside of the game having such a vast land to explore is needing more features in the game which it did not deliver in terms of a mini-map or at least a compass.

Aside from this, the game runs smoothly and I absolutely adored all the creatures you encounter on your adventure.
All animals appeared boxy, with big eyes, wearing human clothing, and conversing with cute handwritten scrawls between you and other characters.

One of my favourite characters was Roy the raccoon who had built himself a trade shop in the middle of the forest for you to trade garbage in exchange for useful in-game items.

I absolutely loved the other theme of the game to encourage recycling and to pick up rubbish and take down enemy foes in exchange for equipment upgrades.

The “enemies” in reality are motionless cardboard cutouts decorated to look like monsters and skeletons. It really ties in the theme of using your imagination throughout the game.

Link In Park

Before you think any tracks from Hybrid Theory or Meteora (two of their best albums btw) feature in the soundtrack, they don’t.
The music worked perfectly in tune with keeping a relaxing and chill tone. I honestly felt happy to listen to the mixture of light percussion, piano, and xylophone playing to add to the ambience.
Unlike our Hylian character, Lil Gator does talk, but as with all the other creatures you don’t hear voices, only the dialogue tone as you skip through the chatter.

Even the dialogue tone felt like ASMR with its cute bubble sound, almost as relaxing as aimlessly scrolling through the dialogue in Animal Crossing.

Closing thoughts

There aren’t many games out there that captures the perfect balance of childlike wonder and nostalgia like Lil Gator does.

Although there is little direction in the game; voicing my thoughts earlier, the game could have gone a long way in helping players by adding a mini-map or at least a compass as it got frustrating at times getting lost or wishing I had some form of custom waypoint to return back to.
Having a checklist of quests in the form of a journal would have also proved handy, so you didn’t have to wait for the megaphone tool to find the remaining characters.

I’m lucky I’m OCD with being a completionist that the majority of the characters were found to help complete the town before unlocking this feature at the end.

Despite the direction issue, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and it was a welcome touch to my cozy Sunday afternoon.

Lil Gator is available on Steam for £16.75.