Inside: Lil Gator Game, Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, Dredge, Dadish

go play lil gator game

Lil Gator Game
Adventure, 3D Platformer

Lil Gator Game currently has an insane 99% positive out of 3700 reviews on Steam. This is because it is perfect. I genuinely assume anyone who gave this a negative review is just trolling, or perhaps an evil alien. It’s so loveable and wonderful that writing a review for it almost seems uncouth. Just go play it. Go. Go.

… Lil Gator Game is a 3D exploration game with some light platforming. It clearly counts A Short Hike among its influences, but it’s better in every way. It’s also a touching and perceptive story about growing up, figuring out who you are, and why small things in our childhood can mean so much to us. It’s about priorities and empathy and honesty. It’s also a love letter to how weird and passionate kids can be, how capable they are even when the adults around them forget. And lest you worry all that means it’s one of the horribly depressing indies about like, trauma and the inevitably of death that are so hot right now, it is very much not that. It’s just a really human story. About a lil gator.

It’s the rare game I honestly think is a must-play for anyone.

Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara
3D Platformer, Runner

More ChiBig! I really should have just done a dedicated post to their catalogue but whatever.

Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara is one of the best 3D precision platformers I’ve played in a long time, especially in terms of pure fun. It also convinced me that I actually do like runners, I just don’t like shitty ones, because the running levels were some of my favorites, which I didn’t expect. The bright, colorful visuals and excellent sound design along with the fun level design really create just a wonderful experience.

And I have to say, one of the things I appreciate most about ChiBig’s games, but especially this one, is just how achievable they are. This is a game where you are meant to see and do everything — to get all the collectables, to gold-medal all the time trials, to finish all the sidequests. And I cannot tell you how refreshing that is, especially in this genre. There are an absolute glut of 3D platformers that think good level design is just setting the goal time so low it’s nearly impossible to beat (looking at you, Mail Mole). I am 36 years old and dying, I do not have the time to reset a level over and over and over and OVER because I timed a jump a split second too early and that made 100%ing the level impossible. I don’t have the time to comb every level for cheese shortcuts I can use to cut 0.05 off my time. This is the equivalent of “memorize long strings of numbers” in puzzle games, a rote difficulty increase without any added complexity. It’s become my biggest pet peeve in this genre.

(I also just… fundamentally don’t understand putting in effort to design a game and then making sure most people won’t see it. What’s even the point of that.)

KatFPoM hits that lovely, lovely medium where everything is doable, but it’s still interestingly challenging. It’s got that thing that VVVVVV had (though it wasn’t nearly as hard!), where you fail a little further each time and come in with a plan about how to get even further. Even on some of the harder levels, like the one where you had to place the marbles, I never felt frustrated or bored as I tried to 100% it — it was always a meaningful kind of challenge.

This game is kind of the reverse of most ChiBig games, in that it’s really about the gameplay and the story is kind of secondary. It’s a really lite plot and I’m not sure how comprehensible it would even be to someone who didn’t play Summer in Mara, but that doesn’t really matter — it’s about the game. I liked the look of the simplified characters and island and enjoyed zooming around the archipelago from a birds-eye perspective. It was just fun. A+.

Dredge
Fishing, Exploration

For at least a year, Dredge was, far and away, the most-wishlisted game on Barter, (that honor now goes to BG3). It was on my wishlist too — there was something so enticing about it that caused it to seem to transcend individual preferences. I normally like fishing games, but I’m not normally a horror person. And yet…

Dredge is amazing. It’s a fishing/exploration/horror game that definitely goes beyond the boundaries of the usual fishing game in terms of appeal — I would certainly call it a general rec. Not only does it have some of the most fun fishing mechanics I’ve encountered, the environments and story really take it to the next level. It’s just worth experiencing.

It’s a bit hard to talk about without getting into spoilers, but I’ll say this — one thing I really don’t like about horror, especially lovecraftian horror, is how doomeristic is can be (looking at you, FromSoft). I like that Dredge is about trying to figure out what’s going on so you can make it right. I like that knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge are valid. I like that the researcher isn’t punished for learning — that her inventions work, and help you, that the problem is when it becomes exploitative. I like that the goal is to atone, not to just say, “Well everything is both shit and unknowable so I guess that’s that.” It’s a sad game, as it has to be, but it’s a sad game about being better next time and the importance of listening to the world around us. The world isn’t a meaningless, unknowable other — the horror comes from somewhere, and I think that’s a really important and unusual thing for this kind of game to lean into. And as all good indie games do nowadays, it has a nice critique of corporate environmental colonialism. (Not unrelatedly: This is the kind of amazing thing you can get when your government supports the arts.)

This was a game I didn’t want to get to the end of. I 100%ed the base game, then bought all the DLC so there’d be more to do, then 100%ed that, and then had to admit to myself it was over. But it will definitely be one I think about for a long time.

Also the first time I ran into one of those anglerfish I lost my goddamn shit.

Dadish
Precision Platformer

The three original Dadish games have become possibly my favorite 2D precision platformers; in any case, they’re the best I’ve played in a long time. It’s one of those cases where I enjoyed them so much it’s hard to know what to say. Unlike, again, a lot of platformers, they were challenging without being unfun, had hidden secrets without drowning the player in thousands of collectibles meant to inflate playtime without adding anything meaningful (this is the current biggest sin of 2D platformers), and had goofy, self-aware writing that genuinely made me laugh. There was a delightful absurdity to the tone that was well-complemented by the gameplay. In terms of play, it reminded most of Super Mario World, possibly more than anything I’ve played — it was that combination of bright, cheery, incredibly weird (we forget just how weird the Mario games are…) and deliciously challenging.

I enjoyed Dadish so much I bought the Dadish Collection, which includes 2 and 3, as well as Dadish 3D. While I did like 3D, there were definitely some growing pains for the dev in the move from 2D to 3D in terms of level design — many of the levels still felt like 2D levels in a way that’s kind of hard to describe. 3D was a solid entry into its genre, but not as much of a must-have as the eailier games.

Be Brave, Barb, the next game from the same dev, has been on my wishlist for a while, and it looks like he released another game, Dunkadillo, just last month — he seems to have settled on a kind of 2D platformer in a 3D style, combining the kind of level design he’s clearly excellent at with a more modern look. I look forward to trying out both!