Is there anything slicker than a frog? What about a sea frog with a rocket-powered wrench expertly grinding and sliding his way around an overflowing amount of dangerous, varied, and exciting obstacles and objectives across giant sea-faring vessels? Seafrog, developed by OhMyMe Games, is all that and more. There’s a huge amount of gameplay stuffed inside the seahole that Master Seafrog is trapped inside that you’re trying to get out of. I found myself thoroughly enjoying the overall experience, and the game fully took advantage of its designed systems.
Movement & Mayhem
The star of the whole game is the buttery smooth and simple-yet-complex movement style that our main protagonist employs to move around the levels and score “points” at the same time. These points are used to add boost, which can be used to keep your grind going, allowing you to “stick” to surfaces longer as you move, do damage to enemies, and a bevy of other things that allow you to explore even more of the various ships and “hubs” within them. It could really be considered a metroidvania platformer, with its areas that you have to revisit to acquire most of the collectibles. Sometimes I’d find myself in a pickle, where I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do to proceed, only to give up and find out a few areas later that I was never going to be able to proceed without picking up a new skill in a different area. This isn’t to say there isn’t any level of guidance, as the game does include some notes on your skills, but an occasional note like “hey, you can’t do this yet” in certain areas may have helped ferry me along with progression. This method of unguided self-discovery can be a positive to some, so I’m not going to fault them too much for that design decision.
Easy to Play, Hard to Master
Each area has a set of mod chips to collect, which allow you to customize your frog’s stats. These allow you to have extra health, increased boost speed, more trick points, and more boost fuel. You can mix, match, and arrange your selection of equipped chips to increase (or decrease) these stats, which can help you overcome your shortcomings, or increase your chances of finishing a specific challenge. Speaking of challenges, Seafrog has over 100 of them to try and finish, and boy howdy, they are a doozy. Some are more forgiving than others, but trial and error whilst learning and perfecting your control of the grinds, manuals, boosts, and attacks you have control of is a wild ride. I wasn’t a big fan of the “hit one thing and get immobilized and fall out of the sky immediately” concept that the game used, but the relatively compartmentalized really “difficult” sections made it a bit more bearable. This isn’t a hop in the pond, if you get my drift. Seafrog doesn’t hide behind its simplified controls, and instead uses its level designs with themed enemies, grindable architecture, and a growing degree of complexity to its objectives and map exploration requirements to challenge you as a player at every turn. I had to stay on my toes and my eyes peeled at all times, because I never knew when a crab with a vendetta, or a chicken with a reason to scorn me would be waiting around the next bend.
Indeed, one of the main critiques I had of the game was that it was harder than I imagined it to be on the surface, and occasionally trips over itself. Though the penalty for failing wasn’t too bad (you lost your gold currency you had gathered and you had to go chase and defeat an enemy to get it back) it still could take a while to get back to where you were when you lost all your health and then try to do it all again. There was a teleport system, but it was a bit confusing figuring out where you were going and how to unlock those waypoints. Once, I had a score challenge that I was banging my head against a wall trying to accomplish, when, in the end, it was going to be impossible before I picked up a skill that I was just about to unlock. In another instance, I finished a very hard challenge where you had to take out all of the enemies in a room in a certain amount of time. After completion, I went to pick up my reward, only for me to accidentally press the button to restart the challenge right next to it. There were just a few little issues like that that didn’t ruin the experience of Seafrog for me overall, but ones where I wish things had been done a bit differently to prevent some ignorance of the situation by the player from accidentally causing them to waste time.
Voxel + Variety = Vibrancy
Seafrog’s visual design is one that feels like a playful mix of voxel fun and cartoony chaos, and allows for you to very quickly see important platforms, rails, enemies, or anything else you are trying to keep up with as you slide around the levels at breakneck speeds. I was (for the most part) pleasantly surprised at how I could keep up with the 2.5D objects that cropped up. Additionally, as you gain extra skills and practice continuing combos, you start to identify which areas are good for moving around and proceeding upwards, onwards, or wherever that next collectible is. There’s a combination of stop-motion character animations, more defined enemy movements, and a canvas bursting with bright colors which come together to provide a very unique and wonderfully modern retro feel.
Slick Sounds All Around
The sound design, when it comes to the effects used for various enemies, characters, and movements, heavily highlights beeps, boops, and an overall arcadey feel, whilst mixing in a luscious dose of swooshes, blings, and lovely chords that emphasize your tricks, pickups, and skill activations as you do them. It helps you keep up with the craziness happening sometimes, and can assist with confirming that you performed (or didn’t perform) the action you wanted to. Seafrog’s background music keeps things moving, opting for more driving tracks than an epic score, and fits the vibe of the action well. Maybe some more varied tracks could have kept things interesting (since you’re on the ships with similar tracks for quite a long time) but I was so focused on my control of the character that I appreciated not getting distracted, in the end.
In Conclusion
Seafrog had so much focus put into its movement and control scheme that the game built around it had a lot to live up to. Luckily, it does that, with a nice 8-10 hour campaign filled with inventive challenges and lots to explore (that’s just for base-level completion, not even all of the collectibles available to pursue.) Though it has its skill requirements for enjoyment, don’t be fooled by its charming vibe. There’s a bully of a game inside Seafrog, and it's a ton of fun to dive into, grind around in, and try to master.
