Now that we know that DLC is eligible for the top spot at The Game Awards, I’m calling it: The just-announced expansion for Lil Gator Game, dubbed In The Dark, is an absolute shoo-in for Game of the Year… in my household.
Basically Lil Gator Game but make it spooky, In The Dark is a “game-sized” expansion to the 2022 cozy game hit. In our list of Best Cozy Games, I wrote “very few games have captured this feeling of play for me, which makes Lil Gator Game an easy recommendation, and a game I return to more often than you’d think.“ And soon, I can return to it with new stuff!
“In The Dark takes place in the mysterious underground caves (where else would caves even be tbh) underneath the island!,” the brief description on the game’s Steam page says. “You’ll meet new characters, find new toys and whole new stories to be made!”
For more on how this unassuming game — with a title that took, if I’m being honest, literal years to grow on me — became such a hit, read Ryan K. Rigney’s latest in which he asked four successful indie developers where their first 1,000 players came from.
[Game director Connor P Quinn says] the game’s power to move people emotionally was the real difference maker. “I don’t think there’s any substitute for someone popular getting excited about you,” Quinn says. “You can be dead in the water for months and someone with a big following getting excited about you will bring a whole fresh host of customers.”
There’s no release date outside of “when it’s ready” or pricing included in the announcement, so it’s perhaps premature for me to say it will be this year’s game of the year. The good news, however, is that most years are followed by additional years, so there’s always hope.
And because it’s personally important to me that more people play Lil Gator Game, I’m going to help the developers get started on their first thousand for In the Dark and remind you that wishlisting the game on Steam is really easy to do.
