It may be a lil game, but it has a lot of heart. Maybe best described as “My First Open World” or "Breath of the Wild Jr" and this is not as much of an insult as it may sound.

Two points I know I like to know when hearing about a game I can tick off almost instantly in this review are the questions “is it any good?” and “how long is it?” by simply telling you that I finished the game in one sitting that took around three hours and the only thing that stopped me immediately cleaning up everything the game had to offer was it was time to feed the dog.

Once that had been done and I ate dinner myself I spent around another hour doing the rest.
So yes it’s good, and roughly 3-4 hours in length to do everything.

This may not be enough information to satisfy your interest so I will elaborate.
Lil Gator Game is a small open-world game mostly based on movement, some simple platforming, swimming, climbing, floating about and more thanks to a range of interesting items your hero picks up along the way.

Structure wise you are free to roam in whatever direction you like once you’ve completed the quests on the small, BOTW-like, tutorial island, in which you pick up the key three ingredients a hero needs - a sword, a shield and a hat.
About the island are many NPCs that you are aiming to befriend to create a town hub for everyone and impress your Big Sis, but more on that later.
Each of these would-be friends will have small quests for you, some range from clearing out nearby enemies, to classics such as fetch-quests or multi-part adventures where you’re needing to help separate folk to get the attention of one specific pal.
There are weapons, your sword of many varieties and later some ranged tools but the enemies… well they are cardboard cutouts so they don’t put up much (any) resistance.
“Combat” is really just a way of collecting things in the vein of coins, rings, rupees or whatever.

As mentioned earlier Lil Gator Game is more about movement. You can climb anything and, again like BOTW, have a stamina gauge that can be upgraded. Your shield has no need for defense as you can’t be attacked so instead you can use it like a sled, but as the first example of many, just sliding, is not all that the shield does movement wise and this shows the surprising depth Lil Gator Game has with its mechanics.
Different shields can slide in different ways, on top of this jumping while on the shield at the right point can bounce you further and this even includes some quite satisfying skimming along water.
None of these techniques are essential, you’re under no stress, you don’t need to go anywhere in a particular order or under a time-limit but the freedom of fun and discovery is there.
As you collect more items these movement abilities you have expand in the ways you would you expect, like better climbing, gliding and more, but also expand in a couple of fun ways you may not expect such as, minor spoiler, collecting a ninja headband that makes you Naruto run - which is faster.

Lil Gator Game doesn’t have every element or the sheer scale of a Breath of the Wild but it condenses a lot of what the joy of that game is into a tight package which has a cute, child-like aesthetic.

The aesthetic of big blocky colours, speech bubbles, googly eyes and cardboard cut-outs really work as a pleasant vibe that reflects its narrative.
You Big Sis as mentioned earlier, is back on a break from college and you want her attention. You see, as the game reveals from the start, you and her used to play and she was great at making rules for fun games and you were both heavily inspired by (for legal reasons not)The Legend of Zelda.
Sadly for our protagonist, time has passed, you’ve both aged and your Big Sis is busy with assignments and doesn’t seem to have time to play.
Your quest, to get her to remember the fun you had and grab her attention.

Lil Gator Game does a magically wonderful job of capturing a lot of what being a child feels like, and does a good job of giving you a view of this world through a child’s eyes.
The dialogue is fun, it isn’t minimised to monosyllabic words or baby sounding pronunciations though, if anything I wonder if a failing Lil Gator Game might have is that it presents itself for kids but is more for adults with nostalgia when considering how much dialogue there is throughout.
The ending especially, I will not describe the feeling as to not spoil, but it did make me a little glassy-eyed, an effect I don’t imagine it would have on a child but perhaps their parents.

Lil Gator Game is exactly as described in my opening sentence and it does it very well but this does leave stages feeling a little too simple and potentially repetitive.
I will take a moment to applaud the post-game as “cleaning up” in open-world games is a task for the sick honestly, but “gamer brain” does mean that an 87% for example, must become 100% or I can’t sleep and this title makes it as easy as possible.
It isn’t quite doing it all for you but it gives as much a helping hand that if anymore would mean you could just put the pad down and line, they manage to hit perfectly and give you a small reward for your time which feels as sweet as the rest of the experience.

For all of its child-like fun and wonder in design and aesthetic, Lil Gator Game is maturely put together, well-crafted and feels truly sincere. If you need a short game for a palette cleanser, but you still want a sense of play and not just story - you can’t go too wrong with grabbing this title or playing it for “free” via GamePass.

When writing anything I do wonder about the audience who will read it, the likeness is that it’ll be a handful of friends at most, maybe a few extra “randoms” via searching for specific titles or if I get Bingo by hitting the front page of the site.
If it wasn’t clear from the opening paragraph of reflection a lot of my reviews are almost more like journals, after all the site does have a journal tab that records your progress and it feels like a logical way to look at the process. I’m not writing for a specific audience, I’m writing for me - sure I want people to read my words and I enjoy the interactions and conversations it can create but to imagine yourself as a “writer” here, however good you are is a little too out there from my perspective.

I say this because if I were running a website or magazine I wouldn’t give someone like me (straight, white, male) this game to review because the writing, the subjects it touches on are never going to quite hit as hard.
Sure I can, and will, break down the game by its mechanics and touch on how good I felt the writing was but this game didn’t and could not hit on a level it will for some.
From my perspective, whatever that is worth, Thirsty Suitors is well written and feels mostly quite open, deep and honest about a whole range of different genders, sexualities and cultures.
I say mostly because the occasional character piece did feel cliché, bordering stereotypical to me but I am not in the position to fully judge if they did lean too far or not.

The writing, be it between Jala (the protagonist) and her parents, her internal monologue with her “sister” in her head or in the quite out there pseudo-psychic battles with her exes, is strong.
Characters are funny but also flawed, some more obviously than others but everyone feels real even whilst being presented in a cel-shaded-like style in a semi-cartoonish world.
I cannot deny that some of the writing did straight up make me feel old, but I never once felt as with a lot of media that “kids don’t talk this way”. I say kids, they’re mostly in their twenties.

Plot wise this story shares a lot with Scott Pilgrim, although rather than fighting a new partner's exes it surrounds Jala returning home (90’s Washington US) to face and make-good with her exes as well as her family.
I will not delve deep into each character but Jala is (I assume) a pansexual, cis female, American with an Indian mother and Sri Lankan father. As I said near the start, a much more diverse and interesting spectrum of gender, race and sexuality than myself.
Jala has many more exes than I do and unlike me they’re not all just white women.
This game flies the LGBT+ flag with pride and it’s great, it isn’t just Jala’s exes though, it’s not brushed off as just a thing with “the kids” either which is a nice thing to see.
Unlike Scott, Jala is cool and outwardly confident, she skates, she has style and there are a lot of people lusting after her.

Battles with the exes, suitors and Bear cult children (it’s a whole thing) are fought in turn based style, much like a JRPG.
Jala can use taunts that range from thirsty to heartless that show opponents weaknesses and can create debuffs. It’s an interesting system where you’re discovering what the suitor type is and exploiting it with specific attacks against it while at the same time trying to avoid the same happening to Jala.
The combat is sadly a little basic, it uses Mario RPG like QTE elements to keep the moves engaging but the system barely evolves outside of some summons.
The strength of the system however is not only how it reflects the whole idea of the game, a battle of wits - but also some deep reflections but how it integrates conversations and conversational choices within to further the story and give you a much more colourful impression of the characters in it.
The highlights of these are the boss battles against the exes where their insecurities and the like are visualised as how they see themselves and also with things that may protect them.
One of the more interesting boss fights is against an ex who clearly has an internal conflict about not only showing their sexuality but who they should be culturally - wanting to be progressive but also wanting to carry history with them.
Although some of these visualisations are arguably simplifications, they are easy to understand even for a default player 1 like myself and also to the game’s benefit are exciting to look at.

Outside of RPG battling and some conversational choices, the game has two other elements.
First off is skateboarding, a passion of Jala’s and the way she traverses the main town area.
Sadly it just feels quite bad to do, boards tend to be somewhat magnetic in games and as a fan of Jet Set Radio I am not against it - but here it’s turned up too much.
Jala gets sucked towards things too easily and although can stop very fast just feels like she is bumping into so much if you’re trying anything precise.
You do get used to how it controls but becoming competent with something does not mean it becomes enjoyable. At best some segments feel like a mini-roller coaster in an almost 3D Sonic way, but in this flow the game doesn’t feel skill based and sometimes just gets in the way.
I found myself wishing Jala could just carry the board and run around town, when the skatepark area opens it took me around 15 minutes to get bored of it and when the game announced the skate challenges were completely optional I couldn’t click on skipping them any faster.

It’s a shame because I feel, putting it in basic terms, skating is the second main part of the game and it has a lot of this game’s landscape dedicated to it but… it’s bad.

The other gaming element is cooking, these are mostly optional too and give Jala a chance to pick the brains of her parents. Cooking itself is QTE challenges with some choices in how to use your heat gauge to gain a better score but sadly is a broken system in the “compliment” wheel being the easiest way to get a high score but the thing with the most RNG.
I took part in all the cooking I could, one of my favourite characters in the game was Jala’s father so interacting with him always kept me smiling. Also the side quests for exes you made up with all mostly had you cook for them so you could get ahead of that.

The other benefit to cooking was getting food items for it that were for healing in battle.
Skating challenges would give you attack items and cosmetics but sadly the game falls apart a little here too.
I never set any difficulty down but I never felt the need to use items until some later boss fights and that was to keep my health topped up and nothing more.
Due to most fights being about the conversations and finding weaknesses I never really felt Jala needed the extra hand with tools, the summons you get as the game progresses were more than enough to keep on top of the increasing levels of the opposition.
This meant that not only did I not want to do the skating because it felt bad, there was no real incentive to do so. Really outside of dialogue there wasn’t any incentive to do anything bar follow the critical path.

I say falls apart but specifically “a little” because really this game is much more like a VN under its skin. It has systems and skateboarding but I think the people that will love Thirsty Suitors would love it without these, bare naked and being honest about itself like the story is trying to be.
Don’t get me wrong, the game tries to be more and it doesn’t fail, it just doesn’t succeed in a meaningful manner. Having these mechanics and systems makes it a lot easier to swallow and probably a lot more approachable.

While what Thirsty Suitors does have to show is nice, well presented with decent voice acting, music and a great art direction it can feel a little bare.
The house is essentially one room with a few items to look at. The town has four buildings which are all one room with little in them to interact with and the skatepark side of things is there but nothing new or exciting - and that is it, three areas which while again presented nicely are on one of the most pointless maps in games.

Overall I had a good time with Thirsty Suitors, it never really outstayed its welcome but would have felt much a much tighter experience with the skating completely cut.
The story and characters were great and although I cannot fully relate to it all the game did definitely make me feel for a lot of the characters and enjoy a good few of them being around.
Jala herself was a joy as a protagonist but sadly what she had to do outside of talking wasn’t all that satisfying.

Reviews are not entirely about their scores, but if you look at this as low, know that there are two major factors which I believe could make this a much higher rated game for you personally.
First mechanically you might actually enjoy skateboarding, want to do all the challenges and this will give Thirsty Suitors much more meat on the bone as an experience.
Secondly is if you are LGTQ+ or from a much more interesting background than me because the flavour of this game will be so much more aromatic or even spicy to you.

To end with a cliché, variety is the spice of life.
I believe this is important within people and I think it is important with art too. I’m happy this game exists, I am especially happy that this is on many systems including Game Pass and possibly coming to more because even if you are just a straight white male like me who is probably not putting this on their GOTY list it is really worth listening to what it has to say.

I've said this a lot in a good couple of reviews for games I've just beaten, but I do think we often take for granted how good we have it in the current state of games. It can be very easy to get into a doom spiral of an industry that is worthy of a lot of criticism thrown at it, and to be fair, I think a lot of it is justified, and I'm not saying to ignore that. But more often than not, we tend to overlook just how amazing the last five years have been for niche titles. Games that likely wouldn't have garnered much attention or sales, just a console generation ago, now have the opportunity to get a huge spotlight shown on it, and sometimes get the chance to be the big game of the week.

I'm not saying the premise of just being able to play as a real cat exploring a decently big world, wouldn't have caught on years ago, its just an inherently fun concept; what I am saying is that Stray is everything the current wave of modern niche titles have been leading up to, and its all the more commendable and better for it. I think Stray is a game that doesn't need a whole lot to say about the actual content of the game, the premise is enough, and you're likely already interested or have played it already from that alone. All I want to say, for this game, and all other huge successful games that have gained so much glowing attention and love in the past five years. Keep enjoying them, and keep giving attention to weird lil projects like this. It has made this hobby such a treat to continue putting time into.

I went into this expecting a unique vibeworthy story driven experience based on the premise alone but sadly it couldn't live up to its potential.

The first road trip you take feels engaging in seeming like a game that's branching inward/outward based on randomized scenarios or choices you make but after the next few road trips it becomes clear this is kinda of a lie. It's more like you just start over with an alternate route and just happen to come across the characters in random parts of their stories and after a while it becomes predictable and underwhelming. The characters who pop up throughout are fine, I guess -- everything to do with Jarod is cool because he fills that tortured hard boiled Sin City criminal niche decently, and Stan and Mitch can be fun -- but they either feel too annoying or lacking to really stand out memorably. Even when you basically replay the game 6 times to get the full experience of the non-linear presentation, the background politics coming to a climax, and the characters being more connected than first realized it doesn't feel fully earned because the writing isn't quite there enough.

Some of the random scenarios you can come across on your road trip can still be fun and very charming. Whenever they try to do something with the gameplay by inserting little brief mini game-like segments is where it picks up the most. My favorite from my playthrough has to be the random vignette where you take a pit stop and find the abandoned cabin from the young couple. I only wished there were more simpler yet unexpected encounters like that in the game to really feel like a wholly unique experience.