Frogatto & Friends

expensive but worthy

Visuals are absolutely amazing and the music is such a great vibe, I basically grew up on this game.

So first of all, I need to emphasize: [h1]DON'T USE WORLD EDITOR WITHOUT BACKING UP YOUR GAME DATA![/h1] It's buggy enough to wipe your progress by passing a checkpoint in editor, or using a handful of key combinations. More precisely, back up %appdata%\frogatto4. There are some kinks to be fixed, like stuck boss fights, symbol matching puzzle sometimes being broken – but those are generally not too irritating and this behavior happens relatively rarely: it can be resolved by restarting the game or going back to previous world, for those issues respectively. Another quirk is not being able to bind Frogatto's powers to different keys – it's hardcoded to work with Q and W. That means, when you bind the key for "up" to W, you are reciprocally moving (staring) upwards AND switching between powers. I found this game by asking Copilot to offer me a game similar to SuperTux, as I enjoyed it previously (I do, in fact, give a shoutout to SuperTux). Nonetheless, I don't have past experiences with this game. Otherwise, the game is fun and splendid, I shall say that it was well worth the $25 from my personal perspective, however I may hold a bias for the reason that frog is my favorite animal, and that I enjoy forgiving platformer games: by forgiving I mean games that take a different approach than Mario games, say Super Mario World restarts the game once multiple limited attempts are failed; here in Frogatto, you restart at last checkpoint no matter how many times you die. So far, I'll boldly announce that it was a better purchase than Minecraft, Terraria or Stardew Valley, even though this game is finite – now this is, of course, subjective, but I'm pleasantly surprised that such obscure game outperformed "universally liked titles by the mainstream audience", at very least for me. I finished the game over the course of one month, playing the game like 30 minutes each day within cycle of rage quitting some levels and continuing them later. The story is a solid okay, I kind of wished it was more nuanced. Having finished the game, it really reminded me of the moment when France's Macron went to Moscow, met with Putin, and cheerfully believed that Putin won't invade Ukraine – the rule of thumb is, you don't just trust your enemy or enemy's spokespeople. I'm not a fan of Frogatto deciding that "Milgram's got a point" at the end, however the ending is a good opportunity for an intriguing sequel where it turns out that Frogatto was wrong about negotiations. Milgram is the second-easiest boss in game to fight – I'm not sure if that's good or bad, frankly speaking. Previous bosses were maybe 4+ times harder than Milgram... now perhaps the effort pays off for you to have an easier final boss, rethorically speaking? Some rougher edges aside, I'll still reiterate that it's somewhat worth playing. Also, I have "0.5 hours" on this game, as I don't keep Steam running all the time – I just install my games, and set it to not launch at log on.

Love this game. Amazing graphics, fun platform and proud to be apart of the beta team! Go enjoy this amazingly crafted platformer!

This was disappointing, and I was only in casual mode. The game was kind of fun and interesting at first. The art and sound were very good(except for the NPCs, who had no sense of art style cohesion in most of their designs, which detracted from the atmosphere), and the story and dialogue were okay-ish, if not poorly thought out at times. The main issue for me is the jumping controls and the amount of enemies in the later areas. Enemy crowding became an apparent issue in the forest area's evil eye cave and swamp, where it became so crowded that getting through some stretches of land became a matter of chance rather than skill and patience. This was especially bad in the swamp, where nearly all enemies could not be attacked without magic attacks and upgraded regeneration, being so poor that I could not rely on fighting anything to make it through. There is also a general presence of awkward enemy placement through some areas of all the destinations I went through that caused the same troubles as enemy crowding, overall making the gameplay tedious and chore-like. Jumping and level traversing in the later areas are the second reasons I quit, as the jumps you need to make in order to progress can be obscenely hard to make. This main comes from the swamp's bouncing shelf mushroom areas where I need to jump over acid pits, but the length of the jumps is almost always too short and unreliable, or when I need to drop down a shaft of them, but the crevices of solid ground I needed to jump between where too close to the mushrooms that forced me back up. I gave up at the post-mushroom boss level, at the area with a large pit with floating mushroom platforms that sink when you stood on them, but unlike normal falling platforms, when they fell, you lost so much of your jump height that you can barely jump off them or up to the next one. Either way, this game is not only poorly designed but pricey for the quality of almost everything it provides, but the only thing I liked beyond the sound and level art where the boss fights and mini-boss hoard fights. The bosses were the only things that were actually somewhat intuitive to learn and relied on skill to beat instead of luck and brute force, and the hoards I got to fight were a manageable and nice challenge. 4.5/10: Don't waste any money on this game unless you want to play around with the level editor or practice your modding skills on it, as playing it even in casual mode will be a horribly tedious and disappointing experience.

Really great game, I remember playing this for the first time many years ago. Still holds up. the platforming with the background can sometimes be a little confusing. but thats really it for cons for me. Great graphics, decent soundtrack, really fun gameplay. Love this game

This game is truly a labor of love. This game has been getting updates for over 10 years. I remember coming across one of the early versions of this game as freeware, and it amazes me that the devs keep working on it. The beginning and ending has not changed much, but a lot has been added in between. The game is available for free outside of Steam, so you can honestly get that version and see if you would like the game. The Steam page here is more for supporting the devs for continuously updating the game. The game is quite cute from the protagonists to most of the enemy designs, but don't let the aesthetic fool you -- this game is very difficult. I can recommend it if you want a very hard platformer -- old-school difficulty kind of hard. This kind of difficulty is from back in the day when you had to input physical coins and when controllers had no joysticks, where the difficulty curve is more like a roller coaster than a mountain. You have to prove that you have master the attack pattern of the bosses because a majority of the bosses can only be damaged by specific projectiles, and those objects will spawn sparsely depending on what boss you are facing. And I was playing on the "casual" mode; I can only imagine how challenging the "Challenge" mode actually is. The cherry on top is the music. The music is not intrusive nor does it stand out, but it provides a very subtle charm as you play. I especially like the calm ending music

A beautiful game over a decade in the making, with love poured into every inch of it's non linear design, lovely soundtrack, and on top of all of that: is open sourced. There are some difficulty spikes and it can be a fair challenge, but c'mon, this package costs as much as Dave the Diver and a pack of Nerds Gummy Clusters. Its worth it.

PLEASE ADD STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS

Been waiting on this one awhile. The pixel art speaks for itself. I avoided spoilers like the plague so I've just been waiting on the steam release. Just played the introduction through the first boss. So far its a moderately challenging platformer. Controls are super tight. Will update once I clear the game for now this is a strong recommend.