After a long 12 months, 2022 is almost over. It’s been a busy year on the gaming side, with demanding games like Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarok eating up hundreds of hours. If you’re looking for a quick low-stakes come-down before the ball drops, Lil Gator Game is the perfect adventure for your New Year’s weekend. Lil Gator Game is a short and endearing little adventure game that pays tribute to The Legend of Zelda in the cutest way possible. It stars a young alligator who sets out on a mini-quest to befriend as many animals as possible in a small open world. Players have to complete simple quests for potential friends, which can be as simple as fighting off a few cardboard monsters or retrieving a lost, oversized pencil. It’s similar in structure to A Short Hike, another tiny indie adventure game starring animals, though it’s more direct and playful about its design inspirations. Early on, players get their first sword (a stick) and a shield (a pot lid) before finding a familiar “pointy floppy” hat. After a few short quests, the gator gains the ability to climb any surface and glide through the air using an oversized t-shirt — a mechanic that a frog friend pokes fun at as being from a “different game in the series.” Everything here, from gameplay to writing, is light and sweet. The island is a soft wash of natural colors that’s relaxing to stroll around. Traversal is streamlined and smooth. Its lack of a map or quest log left me feeling a bit lost at times, but the world is compact and easy enough to get around that I was never wandering too long. Even when I was lost, I could always find a new friend to help out by completing a simple quest that was easy enough for a kid to understand That last bit is the most important part. Lil Gator Game is a “kids game,” but I don’t mean that it’s “a game for children.” Rather, it’s an adventure game that lets older players see the world through the eyes of a kid. It transports me back to when I was young and goofing around on the playground: a stick became a sword, a simple task became a quest, and a friend became a valuable ally in whatever imaginary battle I was fighting. Lil Gator Game captures that youthful energy, where the world is just one big playground. If you’re looking for a good game to play with your kids, or simply want to understand their perspective, Lil Gator Game is a breezy three-hour adventure that charms with silly and sincere writing. Everyone could use more good-natured games that are just about making friends and spreading kindness — adults included. Lil Gator Game is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch. Farming sims often blur together for me. The familiar gameplay loop of growing crops, forming bonds with locals, and making a profit along the way is fun but, if you are me, can get stale. Some of that comes from an endgame that often centers around maximizing efficiency (and money-making) rather than refocusing on the community you are taking part in. With Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, developer Marvelous is hoping to break that familiar cycle. Releasing on August 27 for Nintendo Switch and PC, Grand Bazaar is a remake of a 2008 title for the Nintendo DS. While the familiar bones of the Story of Seasons (formerly Harvest Moon) franchise is here, likely to satisfy any farming sim fan, what makes this entry stand out is the titular bazaar. It’s a charming system that turns selling products into another pillar of the experience in a way that puts the community themes of the game first. After going hands on with the title for an hour and getting a taste of the bazaar, I was surprised just how well this feature makes Grand Bazaar feel like a breath of fresh air for the genre.
Setting up shop
Grand Bazaar will feel largely familiar to anybody who has played other Story of Seasons titles. The daily loop of attending to crops, cattle, and the community is still here. What is new is that bazaar. This is a weekly event that occurs on Saturdays. During morning and afternoon shifts, shopkeepers will open up stalls and sell their wares. The twist is that I have to do that too. You would think with so many vampires in video games that we’d have more actual good vampire video games. Yet despite everything from Castlevania to The Sims 4 including blood suckers in some form or another, most games miss the point of what has made vampires so compelling. They lack bite. That is, the biting commentary vampires excel at as vessels of our larger societal fears during any given moment in time. There are — at best — two vampire video games that successfully pull this off: 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines and 2018’s Vampyr. With the release of narrative RPG Cabernet, that number goes up to three.
A night on the town
Vampires are social monsters. The terror they inflict comes from their ability to look like us and glide through regular society while carefully picking off prey to feed upon. While they have different powers depending on the story, mostly vampires use charm as their weapon of choice. This is the core idea behind Cabernet. Much like 2022’s Pentiment, this is largely a game about talking to people and building relationships. The caveat is that those relationships likely always come with a price. It’s my favorite time of the year at Digital Trends. Every time a year ends, I like play prognosticator and predict what’s going to happen in video games the following year. I’ve run this series for the past few years and I often find that my guesses are spot-on come December. That’s always a rewarding moment as I reflect on a long 12 months. On the flip side, sometimes I’m so embarrassingly wrong that I get a good laugh to end the year. This year, it’s the latter.

After a long 12 months, 2022 is almost over. It’s been a busy year on the gaming side, with demanding games like Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarok eating up hundreds of hours. If you’re looking for a quick low-stakes come-down before the ball drops, Lil Gator Game is the perfect adventure for your New Year’s weekend. Lil Gator Game is a short and endearing little adventure game that pays tribute to The Legend of Zelda in the cutest way possible. It stars a young alligator who sets out on a mini-quest to befriend as many animals as possible in a small open world. Players have to complete simple quests for potential friends, which can be as simple as fighting off a few cardboard monsters or retrieving a lost, oversized pencil. It’s similar in structure to A Short Hike, another tiny indie adventure game starring animals, though it’s more direct and playful about its design inspirations. Early on, players get their first sword (a stick) and a shield (a pot lid) before finding a familiar “pointy floppy” hat. After a few short quests, the gator gains the ability to climb any surface and glide through the air using an oversized t-shirt — a mechanic that a frog friend pokes fun at as being from a “different game in the series.” Everything here, from gameplay to writing, is light and sweet. The island is a soft wash of natural colors that’s relaxing to stroll around. Traversal is streamlined and smooth. Its lack of a map or quest log left me feeling a bit lost at times, but the world is compact and easy enough to get around that I was never wandering too long. Even when I was lost, I could always find a new friend to help out by completing a simple quest that was easy enough for a kid to understand That last bit is the most important part. Lil Gator Game is a “kids game,” but I don’t mean that it’s “a game for children.” Rather, it’s an adventure game that lets older players see the world through the eyes of a kid. It transports me back to when I was young and goofing around on the playground: a stick became a sword, a simple task became a quest, and a friend became a valuable ally in whatever imaginary battle I was fighting. Lil Gator Game captures that youthful energy, where the world is just one big playground. If you’re looking for a good game to play with your kids, or simply want to understand their perspective, Lil Gator Game is a breezy three-hour adventure that charms with silly and sincere writing. Everyone could use more good-natured games that are just about making friends and spreading kindness — adults included. Lil Gator Game is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch. Farming sims often blur together for me. The familiar gameplay loop of growing crops, forming bonds with locals, and making a profit along the way is fun but, if you are me, can get stale. Some of that comes from an endgame that often centers around maximizing efficiency (and money-making) rather than refocusing on the community you are taking part in. With Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, developer Marvelous is hoping to break that familiar cycle. Releasing on August 27 for Nintendo Switch and PC, Grand Bazaar is a remake of a 2008 title for the Nintendo DS. While the familiar bones of the Story of Seasons (formerly Harvest Moon) franchise is here, likely to satisfy any farming sim fan, what makes this entry stand out is the titular bazaar. It’s a charming system that turns selling products into another pillar of the experience in a way that puts the community themes of the game first. After going hands on with the title for an hour and getting a taste of the bazaar, I was surprised just how well this feature makes Grand Bazaar feel like a breath of fresh air for the genre.
Setting up shop
Grand Bazaar will feel largely familiar to anybody who has played other Story of Seasons titles. The daily loop of attending to crops, cattle, and the community is still here. What is new is that bazaar. This is a weekly event that occurs on Saturdays. During morning and afternoon shifts, shopkeepers will open up stalls and sell their wares. The twist is that I have to do that too. You would think with so many vampires in video games that we’d have more actual good vampire video games. Yet despite everything from Castlevania to The Sims 4 including blood suckers in some form or another, most games miss the point of what has made vampires so compelling. They lack bite. That is, the biting commentary vampires excel at as vessels of our larger societal fears during any given moment in time. There are — at best — two vampire video games that successfully pull this off: 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines and 2018’s Vampyr. With the release of narrative RPG Cabernet, that number goes up to three.
A night on the town
Vampires are social monsters. The terror they inflict comes from their ability to look like us and glide through regular society while carefully picking off prey to feed upon. While they have different powers depending on the story, mostly vampires use charm as their weapon of choice. This is the core idea behind Cabernet. Much like 2022’s Pentiment, this is largely a game about talking to people and building relationships. The caveat is that those relationships likely always come with a price. It’s my favorite time of the year at Digital Trends. Every time a year ends, I like play prognosticator and predict what’s going to happen in video games the following year. I’ve run this series for the past few years and I often find that my guesses are spot-on come December. That’s always a rewarding moment as I reflect on a long 12 months. On the flip side, sometimes I’m so embarrassingly wrong that I get a good laugh to end the year. This year, it’s the latter.