How do you build on a game that already feels like the best version of itself? Lil Gator Game was a great game because it was small and focused, a quick little adventure you could finish in a handful of hours. Adding more onto it isn’t something I was necessarily opposed to, but I admit I wasn’t sure if more was what I wanted. Turns out I was wrong: simply more Lil Gator Game was exactly what I wanted.
In the Dark opens up immediately on finishing the main game’s scenario. A villain who’s been residing in caverns beneath the islands who goes by Darklord suddenly shows up and threatens to destroy the playground town the gator and their friends have spent the day building. His “minions” aren’t exactly willing participants, however. By the time the crew arrives on Darklord’s turf to stop him, the people around him are already clearly sick of him. He’s unpleasant, constantly bossing people around and throwing a fit whenever anything doesn’t go exactly how he wants. Just a real jerk. The story goes through the motions of getting him to confront his behavior and how repellent it is and eventually start making proper friends. It’s cute. The story is slight overall given the nature of the plot, but it’s enjoyable all the same. There’s some fun gags and the writing continues to be charming.
Lil Gator Game’s strengths came from how well it leveraged the small, densely packed islands it’s set on. They’re a literal playground for you to clamber around. The caverns of In the Dark still embody that same playful energy, every nook and cranny filled with stuff to find. The more complex geometry of the underground is slightly more involved to navigate due to the reduction of sight-lines to find landmarks, which makes it easy to get turned around and trickier to get your bearings. It’s a big change from the open space of the island’s surface where you can just climb trees or hills and pick a direction or glide through the air to cover ground quickly. Here it’s more a matter of just wandering around at will or paying close attention to the surroundings and following roots or cables to see where they lead.
It’s a good illustration of the differences in level design each area requires. The outdoors serve the kind of play Lil Gator Game operates in because open spaces give you more room to have fun with movement. The more constricted confines of the underground still work for this game’s purposes, but it is definitely a different mode of exploration. The verticality is reduced, but also more meaningful because the cave interiors take slightly more work to scale than the trees and mountains of the island outside. I wouldn’t call the underground more challenging, but it is a good change of pace. That the caves are harder to build a mental map of only helps make them exciting to explore.
In the Dark does introduce some new gear that add abilities that alter how you move. A pickax lets you perform a spinning jump forward, for example, while a bubble wand gives you a better jump. A lance lets you effectively air dash and a propeller can be used to soar through the air in a straight line. These abilities have a separate stamina system denoted by stars you earn with each new piece of gear, which limits what you can do at first, but by the time you’ve collected a few of them they become very fun ways to move through the caves.
The best thing I can say about In the Dark is that it was fun to revisit Lil Gator Game. The DLC doesn’t make any massive additions or alter the core structure in any way. It’s just more. Because In the Dark requires you to have reached the end of the main game to access it, this served as a good opportunity to play through the whole thing again. It was nice to play it again! Game’s still fantastic, a great example of how smaller-scale worlds lend themselves to open world design. The DLC is a good addition, a fine way to cap off a full replay of the game.
Callum Rakestraw is the Reviews Editor at Entertainium. You can find him on Bluesky, Mastodon, and his blog.
