I Wani Hug That Gator - Review and discussion

I first discovered this game because of porn.

That’s prolly a wild way to start a review, but I should prolly make that blunt. I am a huge scalie, and I like gator girls. However, I am also quite gay, and while I really love visual novels, I tend to avoid hetero ones. But this looked cute and had very good reviews, so why not, I’ll handle the straights’ nonsense for the day.

I ended up staying up until like 4AM, and then took the day off today to finish it. I enjoyed it, quite a lot!

And then I sat down to write the review, and I did some research into the game so I could provide even the BAREST amount of background information, and oh my fucking god. I got got, y’all.

IWHTG is made by a team called Cavemanon. You may have heard of that team, you might not have. I had not. I saw the game, saw the cute scalie art style, and went “oh I like that”, but holy SHIT, reader, the backstory behind this team put such a bad taste in my mouth that I went to bed sad. It made me completely recontextualize EVERYTHING I had thought while playing this game in a way I haven’t had to do in a while.

So many years ago, there was a game coming out called “Goodbye Volcano High”. I had never heard of it. It looks kinda cute, and you MAY notice there’s a visual similarity between the styles of Volcano High and IWHTG. See, GVH is a queer rhythm/visual novel game about dinosaurs in highschool, and apparently some anonymous 4chan users saw this, and decided to create Snoot Game. Snoot Game is a visual novel using the assetts from GVH to openly mock it and twist it into something else.

Yes, the #1 thing that got me into this game, the cute art style, is entirely stolen. Well if I get ANYTHING From this, its that I should look into playing Goodbye Volcano High.

After THAT success, this team went on to make IWHTG and some other game I haven’t looked into much. Apparently they’ve also ripped people off, there’s rumors that some orders for something aren’t fulfilled, and other rumors that some people haven’t been paid for things. So all in all, Pretty Rough. You may be wondering how I didn’t realize I was playing a far right 4chan-lead project. Well, IWHTG really doesn’t give anything away itself. It’s MUCH more obvious in Snoot Game, where your main character is a faceless self insert called Anon, and it tackles heavy topics with all the grace that someone from 4chan would give them. Oh, and apparently the good ending ends with one of the nonbinary protagonists detransitioning. Apparently they die in all the other endings or something like that?

It’s blunt. IWHTG is not really like that.

In IWHtG, you play as Inco, a Human who’s recently moved to a new school for his senior year. If you look at him, he’s obviously just the typical 4chan anon self insert character all of these kinda things use, except he’s wearing sunglasses. Those characters, as I said, are self inserts with no real character or personality. Inco isn’t really like that. He seems like it immediately, but by the end, I felt it was a deconstruction.

Inco has moved around all his life from one place to another. His parents are rich, but they’re never home, and he’s basically been raised by screens. As such he doesn’t know really how to interract with others and has never been able to really make deep connections with others. I mean that DOES sound like 4chan losers, minus the rich parents prolly, but I still don’t think he’s there for you to self insert into. He is his own person. And he has a LOT of personality despite being so nondescript. He’s just… a little broken, from his kind of fucked up upbringing. Like I said, I THOUGHT it was a rather well done deconstruction.

But again, learning about their previous game and their unrepentant behavior, I wonder if I just read too much into it.

I should note, this game has four endings. I got the golden ending, and looked up descriptions for the other endings. Some of them are… kind of dark! In this game you’re kind of graded on how much Inco cares about others VS himself, and that determines endings. In hindsight, maybe this should have made me double take. One of the reviews I read, which again were all very positive because this game has suffered reverse review bombing from 4chan, mentioned “The Simp Ending”. I did not get this ending, or any other ending but the golden ending, so I assumed that wasn’t fully in proper context, but no, this game probably DOES have a simp ending, and that’s one of the bad ones.

Unrestrained simping, yes, not great, but I think it’s not great for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT REASON these people think its not great.

Anyways Inco is at this new school and wants to make friends for the first REAL time in his life. It’s an art focused school, and Inco is in fact, really into art and culture. Specifically photography, which is neat. He’s also the only Human at the school, as he’s moved to a very Dinosaur populated area. Yes, this world has Dinosaurs as people, it’s never really explained. There’s a history class which Inco mostly ignored cause its boring, but he occasionally shows hints of this world’s past, and it’s mostly a piss take mix of our world history and whatever they want. Fair enough. Anyways, one of these people he meets at school is this.

This is Olivia, the school mess. She’s actually NOT a gator, ftr, because these are all dinosaurs, remember. So she’s a Baryonyx. Which is basically an ancient alligator. She’s a grumpy fuckup who does NOT like other people, but Inco becomes friends with her only real friend who is trying REALLY HARD to get her to open her shell, so she has to put up with Inco suddenly slamming into her life.

It is also important to note, Olivia is paraplegic. She has to use a wheelchair to get around anywhere. This is something that could be handled very, VERY poorly. Of course, I’m not disabled in that way. Just in other ways, which the game DOES comment on, and I’ll get to :) but it SEEMED fine? She beats herself up about her disability, and it’s been used to justify giving her a free ride in the past, which she hates, so she’s self destructive because she feels she doesn’t deserve it. This SEEMS fine, but considering the other things in the game, I’m side eying it just a little bit. It reminded me a little of ANOTHER 4chan visual novel dating sim, Katawa Shoujo, which I played years ago when it came out, and I will say, it’s better than that was.

So the story is basically about her and Inco slowly becoming friends, and of course more, while they both learn to grow and get past the things holding them back. Inco by making true friends, and Olivia by working past her trauma and past experiences. And of course, some current experiences too. There’s a bully who treats Olivia like shit, and eventually blackmail enters the picture. Notable, this bully says the r-word twice. At the time I was like “well that sucks, wish they hadn’t used it, but she’s an evil bully, so” but now I think they just that word is okay to use :/

There are a couple other moments in the game that made me double take, but give it the benefit of the doubt, and I’m honestly not sure what to think now. Near the end, in a prom scene, Olivia stands using her tail so that the two of you can dance. It evokes the “SHE’S CURED NOW” happy ending of some stories that are kinda shitty about disabled people, and the game ends up commenting on this, where she’s like “I can stand for a few minutes like this, even though it hurts. And I HATE that, cause now I feel guilty, like other disabled people don’t have that ability. Is that fucked up or what?” so even that, it feels like the writers thought about it, at the VERY least.

Another thing is how this game handles mental health. One of the characters has to take anti-psychotics. He’s got a LOT of built up anguish about this, and is scared about how people will treat him if they know. As someone with a lot of mental health problems, I DO get that. And he has some built up emotions about how Olivia has to live with it openly, and he’s almost jealous, cause she doesn’t have to hide it like he does. He ALSO acknowledges that’s dumb as fuck and he needs to get over it, which he does. This is, for the most part, handled pretty well.

Another thing in the game. There’s a teacher who’s really good for both Inco and Olivia, teaching them and trying to guide them to get past their inner demons. He’s pretty cool and nice, and at the end of the game, he passes away, and it ushers in the final act, where Olivia either gets past her grief in a healthy, or an unhealthy way. This was especially effective on me, because something similar happened to me in college, where my favorite teacher, who had promised to help me out with getting into grad school suddenly passed away with no warning.

This just shows you, even terrible people can create stories that really connect with you emotionally.

There are good elements to this game. A lot of good elements. Most of it is actually very, very good! I like most of the characters, I love the art style, and the romance was really cute! But learning about that backstory of the devs, it’s really hard to get past that, and it puts a bad taste in my mouth. “Just seperate the artist from the art”, you might say, but I can’t do that, and I don’t want to. I don’t want the worst people benefiting from my support. So yeah, don’t get this.

Someone HAS to have made some Scalie Girl yuri for me to consume, right? Anyone got any good recommendations?