Frogmonster

What a treat Frogmonster is! In every way, this game surprised me. Its aesthetic, though basic, works wonders to craft a surprisingly robust atmosphere, bolstered by the repetitive, though enjoyable, music loops. Essentially, this game is a case study in the power of simplicity. There's nothing extravagant about how the game works, and yet it created this unbelievably charming feeling that never abates even by the end. Actually, even more impressive, certain points of the game feel a tad creepy and unsettling. The way monsters charge you with their dead eyes combined with the bloodiness of what you do makes it feel like you actually are a little critter in a big critter world learning to triumph nevertheless. Setting that aside, the combat ended up being more involved than I expected it to be. Bosses tend toward an aggressive, downright exhilarating style of design that makes you feel like you're constantly fighting for your life during most encounters. From the first boss onward, you never feel like you have a moment to breathe in any major encounter. This can fool a lesser player into sort of lackadaisically dashing and jumping around with nary a worry in their mind for actually learning the fight, but the game punishes heavily bad play, and by the end if you don't have a good handle on the game's mechanics, then you will simply not be able to finish. The game, as so many tend to, has its flaws, however. I came into Frogmonster with the impression of it being a metroidvania. It certainly can be considered as such, but you don't really get that many new ways of interacting with the world. There's few moments where areas become totally recontextualized by new abilities or what have you. Instead, it's more of a back and forth between areas that, while enjoyable to look at, do not also have much variety on a moment-to-moment basis. What this means is that the game is quite easy to get lost in if you do not either take plentiful screenshots so you can remember where you need to go, or if you have a great memory and pay a lot of attention to the small stuff about any given room. The world feels nice to explore, but I would not say it is anything to write home about. Thankfully, movement feels quite nice, so I was never unhappy to explore or to backtrack, which you also thankfully do not have to do a great deal of. The guns are all different enough and with varying degrees of applicability such that I was always happy to swap around and no gun ever really went unused (aside from one, the cannon, which just felt annoying enough to use that I disregarded it). With the way that ammo works, this is an expected part of the gameplay loop that you do swap from gun to gun. The magic system was one that I did not really interface with, but I really enjoy the way that healing works as a secondary aspect of it. The main problem for me was that I never wanted to use mana for damage reasons, so therefore I felt incentivized into ignoring the other spells. I think with a retuning of how the healing works from spell to spell, there would be more reason to try out different spells, but it's a minor point. Frogmonster proves that we are, as anyone with love and hope in their heart should recognize, still in a great era for FPSes, this being yet another in a long line of great modern indie FPS games. As much as it takes after its siblings (one in particular, an ULTRA-obvious one), I think it manages to stand out for its great boss design and lovable aesthetic. Give it a go if you've an inclination towards this style, you'll have a ton of fun.