Tunic and Lil Gator Game Are Quite Similar
Of all the games that I played in 2022 that released that year, TUNIC by far is my game of the year. If I had to choose a close second, it would be Lil Gator game.
Besides the idea of playing as a hero clad in green with a sword and shield, I realized that these games are pretty thematically related. They both want to capture the experience of being a child and growing up with games like The Legend of Zelda.
I won’t be spoiling big things in both TUNIC and Lil Gator Game, but both of these games (TUNIC more so) are better experienced while knowing very little initially.
TUNIC
TUNIC does this by examining what it’s like playing a video game as a kid. Having inexperience with games as a whole and a lack of knowledge makes the possibilities seem endless. It uses the lack of clarity and knowledge to give that sense of boundless possibility.
One of the most effective ways TUNIC does this is by creating and using a language (often called RUNIC) that you have no hope of understanding on your first playthrough. This language is used all across the game world in place of an actual language that the player would know.
It’s also used in the game’s quite unique feature: the in-game manual. The manual is an instruction booklet for TUNIC itself mostly written in RUNIC. It uses occasional English words, pictures, and penned-in markings to act as a general tutorial for the player as well as pointing out secrets that hide in plain sight. You can’t understand RUNIC, so you’ll have to look at pictures to try and decipher the meanings of the pages. Throughout the game, you find and collect more pages to add to the manual, and finding each page is an exciting moment as you anticipate the secrets it may hold.
Both RUNIC and the manual help to capture the “childhood experience”. As a kid, you might not have even learned to read when you picked up your first video game. You have to learn how the game works through experimentation, trial, and error. The design language of games that you pick up on as you play games is completely foreign to you. Common tropes like secrets behind waterfalls or bombing cracked walls aren’t a second nature to you. This adds to the sense of mystery and creates the feeling that there’s a big revelation to be found if you could only understand what the game is trying to tell you.
In general, TUNIC obscures a lot of information from the player. This encourages experimentation of all kinds which adds to the feeling of boundless possibility. The most valuable thing you gain on your adventure is knowledge of the world and how to interact with it.
When playing TUNIC, I really didn’t know what it was going to throw at me. I have quite a bit of general game experience, but this game surprised me in the simplest ways. I may have immediately understood 80 percent of the controls before even picking up the game, but the lack of knowledge made me feel like anything was possible.
The in-game manual reminds me of the times where I would scour the instruction booklets of my favorite games (before I inevitably lost them). I tried to extract any information about the game that I could and saw future content made me excited for what was to come.
Lil Gator Game
Lil Gator Game does it by examining the act of play itself. If you liked TLOZ as a kid, you wanted to have a sword and shield and bow and boomerang and go on adventures and do the dodge rolls on the floor. I would know, that was me as a kid! The game wasn’t limited to the console: it fueled your imagination and inspiration in all other parts of your life. Every recess became a time where you play the role of a hero and venture out into the world to defeat monsters.
This is the core essence of Lil Gator Game: you and your friends deck out a whole island with cardboard monsters, items, and quests and you play the role of the hero that needs to save the world all within the span of an afternoon during fall break.
The premise is so simple, but it captures the essence of what it’s like to be a kid. The game is all about using your imagination to create your own fun.
It may be a bit cliché, but Lil Gator Game genuinely reminded me what being a kid felt like. Back then, the world seemed so much larger and every experience was new and exciting.
Both TUNIC and Lil Gator Game accomplish something that I’ve rarely seen games do. They try to capture an experience that goes beyond the game itself: the feeling of endless possibility, imagination, and childlike wonder of experiencing video games as kid.