Glittermitten Grove

If you're going into this without knowing what it's a part of, you're only getting a [b]fraction[/b] of the experience.

im not gay but this is a good game. i do love me some resource management fairy themed simulation games but im not gay. not that being gay is bad. im just not gay personally and i need you to know that. i do love fractions as well why do you ask

As the sequel to Frog Fractions, most will go into this with the expectation that it will follow the same, genre-bending yet cohesive adventure that the first does. On the other hand, those who have never heard of Frog Fractions, those baited in by "Glittermitten Grove" and its colony sim aspects, will likely have no idea what most of the game's work went into. They may not even discover the "true game" at all. This may lead to many types of disappointed players. Despite that, it offers so much fun so long as you understand what the experience ultimately contains: it is a game collection. No one section of Frog Fractions 2 (or is it 3?) is designed with much depth or continuity. On top of that, very little of it actually contains the frog or their fractions, which the original game, despite its experimental design, never failed to do. There was always frogs and fractions, it's part of what made the quirky identity of the game so charming. "How far can you stretch the idea of frogs and fractions?" Well, in its sequel, it is essentially just a random game collection, the frog does appear (albeit fractionless) at one point, but otherwise the only thing that forms a cohesive experience in FF2 is its consistently quirky tone found throughout each game. If you go into it understanding all of this, that it isn't like FF1, and you simply enjoy collections of short games, you would likely enjoy this. Despite how disconnected everything is, it is still fun. It will keep you guessing what comes next, and in at least this way, it captures what made FF1 so mesmerizing. So much secret work went into this game, which is very much this creator's fashion, so don't mistake its lack of depth within each subgame for little to do overall. There are so many secrets and easter eggs if you explore. From the Dark Souls Soapstone system that has a real server that tracks player messages, to the Metroidvania progression of traversing TXT World that includes the overworld constantly changing, to perhaps the most infamous secret, that you can import your real Mass Effect 2 save, and it has real function within the world. Each subgame, TXT World, even the shell game of Glittermitten Grove, they are all fun, so long as you like these specific styles of games, which may not be for everyone. The minimalist colony sim with a cool physics-based foundation, which I found so fun that I spent half of the playtime on just this "shell game"! TXT World, as a love letter to ZZT, adds so many cool details that would not have been possible in 1991. And then each subgame has something new to offer for a short time, creating breaks for the bigger TXT World experience. Overall, I still enjoy Frog Fractions 2, despite it containing very little frogs or fractions.

Glittermitten Grove, when a joke goes on for just a little too long. This game is the next installment in the much discussed Frog Fractions franchise, and it's so committed to the joke, it doesn't even tell you it's part of the series. This game starts its life as a simple, and fairly slow, city builder where you are creating a society for small fairies who live in trees. If you're interested in city builders, this is VERY bare bones, but it's mostly just a way to get you used to the pace of the game before the true nature of things unfolds. If you play this city builder for about and hour or two, you'll unlock the next portion of the game. I won't go into detail as to what comes next, as the best part of this game is finding all the different games you're asked to play and figuring out how to play them. However, that's also just about the ONLY fun thing in this game. This game plays a bit like a rogue-like game where you'll be starting over from the beginning over and over again. There's also zero direction in what you're doing, how you should do it, and what the point of it all is. Bottom line, one of the reasons the original Frog Fractions so memorable to those who played it is how short it was. You can complete that entire game in about the same amount of time it takes just to get started in this game. I've put in about 7 hours into this game, and as far as I can tell I've made it relatively far, but it's just not worth it anymore. Looking at the same rooms over and over again, hoping to find the next mcguffin I need to progress the story state, all while having to move my sword around to keep it from blocking my movement is REALLY annoying. Hence, this game is a joke that goes on a little too long. It's fun, it's funny, and it's got charm, but you can only entice people with weird and zany jokes for so long before they no longer have interest.

Don't be fooled: This is no ordinary city builder or management sim. This is a game about sheer survival. When winter hit, my fairies faced terrible disparities. Berry rationing, no insulation, and the dark dark winter tearing away at their spirits and their bodies. Do not assume that this is a comforting game, because this game will only bring you struggle.

The game you see on the screenshots, the game I thought I bought - I managed to play it for 30 minutes, and it was a rather undercooked colony sim with a few neat ideas, but with shallow mechanics and poor feedback. After those 30 minutes I reached the bottom of the map and found out that this game isn’t a colony sim, but a bunch of minigames stitched together in a DOS-like dungeon adventure. Apart from being falsely advertised there is another huge problem here: most of said minigames suck. At best they are tolerable, at worst - very frustrating. The hub world/adventure part quickly becomes annoying due to your sword being a physical object - and you being forced to constantly rotate it to fit through narrow pathways. The humor wasn’t funny, the references were lame, nothing in this game worked for me. I guess you have to be some sort of fan that knows who the developer is, as most of the positive reviews are all written in a misleading way with inner jokes that are completely lost to the outsiders. TL/DR: the game isn’t what is shown on the store page, but a set of lame minigames, avoid it.

I feel bad leaving a negative review, because each individual piece of gameplay is SOLIDLY good. They just don't come together in a way that's enjoyable. The starting section is lovely. A bit annoyingly opaque at times, but simple once you figure out how things work. The tree physics is nice, and the light mechanics are interesting. Winter can feel punishing, but it's actually quite forgiving in the end. Everything from here on is a spoiler. [spoiler]The dungeoning section is again opaque at first, but simple once you understand what everything does. This section is the real main game; every other mini-game you complete brings you back here to the dungeon with some upgrade or altered state or other. It feels like a puzzle most of the time, which is a pretty interesting mechanic. None of the other games follow logically from each other or from anything in the main section, which is a little disappointing; at least in Frog Fractions, there was a comedic narrative tying each section together. I would have liked to see more comedy and story.[/spoiler] But many have said this. That's not enough to make me uninstall. My real gripe is more acute: [spoiler]They won't let you retry some minigames. Frog Fractions doesn't let you retry either, but it was short and simple. This game is so much longer and more complex that if you want to replay it all again to get back to that minigame, you'll be there for several hours. Picture this: You're doing the detective game set in Dante's Inferno. You've narrowed it down to two suspects in the database, you know one final piece of information that will make the difference, and you know where the suspect ran off to. You think you should maybe put that last bit of info in, but you decide you'll head to the next circle of Hell first and [i]then[/i] log it. Except as soon as you arrive in the next circle, the game locks you out of putting your info in and then tells you you've found the suspect but didn't have a warrant. Because it doesn't let you log the info. The info that you HAVE. And then you lose. Because it doesn't let you log the info that you were ABOUT TO LOG. And then it kicks you out of the minigame. That you WOULD HAVE WON IF IT LET YOU LOG THE INFO. And then it DOESN'T LET YOU TRY IT AGAIN.[/spoiler] It's too maddening. Don't get invested. Save yourself.

Go in blind. Wonderful little game.

It's okay. Its cute and I liked it to start, then I found the underground cave that made me play a different game that I didn't want to play and there was no way back to the fairy village. So I started a new game because heck that I want to play fairy games, but then the plants stop producing food after a few "years" even though they haven't died and they won't grow anymore and all my fairies leave because there's zero food and if I cut down perfectly good trees all of their houses, wood sheds, and pantries will be gone. So I focused on mining, except once you hit a certain point the fairies won't pick up anything anymore so if you find food they just leave it down there with all of the crystals. Then after you play for a few hours the game stops working.

Only real gamers understand the complexities of Glittermitten Grove