So, I'm a sucker for a management sim. Especially the cozy ones. Despite what my 6'+ height, broad shoulders, and upper 200 pounds might tell you, chill cozy games are kind of my bread and butter. You'll more than likely catch me on Stardew Valley or Mini Metro+ for 200 hours for everyone 1 hour you'd find me running and gunning.
Even when I tried Palworld, I adjusted the options pretty heavily so that I can just focus on the management aspects while avoiding some of the game's unnecessary cruelty.
So when I was offered a chance to try out a pixelated management sim about little frogs (some with hats) I leapt (no pun intended) at the chance to give it a go.
Honestly it looked really cool. A management sim heavily inspired by APICO with a fun sense of metaphysical humor? That. Is. My. Jam.
Apparently it isn't my jam though. This is a jelly. And I wasn't ready for this jelly.
See, first off, when I saw that these frogs are little, they are little. Including your character. They reserve a small portion of the screen usually only used by something like Mario's fireball or a lowercase letter in a text box. It got REALLY hard to make out what was what in some situations given my Macbook's small screen. I can't even IMAGINE the vein's flexing on people's eyeballs should they try this bad boy out on a Steamdeck.
Also, at first, if you suffer from choice paralysis like I often do, you're going to hit a snag. It's not so much of hitting a snag, it's more like someone picking up a snag, wrapping it around their fist like boxing tape, and hitting you with it.
After a very short intro that promises some sort of epic quest. A massive frog tasks you with a mission, your character stands before it ready to do their bidding. It seems promising.
But shortly after the intro cut scene you're dropped into a pond that feels like an ocean. You're sort of given control of your character and told to go with god despite your character's god being that which was what left you in the first place.
If you follow the tutorial it'll help you make sense of things, as long as you know to hit G to bring up the tutorial booklet. Even the tutorial booklet seems to be purposely designed as a bizarre grid where the tutorials you pick lead to other tutorials but certain ones can't be accessed unless you've done the other ones first so if you encounter something that your tutorial isn't ready to tell you about, go with god.
That's my main complaint with this game is that the menus and interfaces seem to be intentionally designed to be difficult to work with. I haven't encountered an interface this counter-intuitive since I was a cashier at Gamestop (iykyk). Like, take this example here.
If you're having a hard time reading the text on screen, that's okay because it's not real text. After playing the game, I'm proud to announce that I have absolutely no idea what any of these windows are for. You can hold down Shift while hovering over things to get a brief description of what you're looking at but sometimes you'll get something like "This is a [whatever]" and won't actually explain things.
Over time, you experiment with the different options and start to figure things and the game opens up a lot but man, the juice per squeeze ration is pretty rough. Maybe this is because it's been a while since I played a game like this that's yet to have a wiki, maybe I didn't realize
how much management games require a community to help each other figure out how to do everything and anything, but it felt daunting.
Don't get me wrong, there's some definite management fun to have here, it just takes a good long while. It almost feels like learning a programming language solely to interact with a singular game. For someone like me, it was frustrating and I had to walk away several times and come back so that I could get deep into the game and obtain a better understanding of it. It's just, when doing a management sim the part of management I wasn't expecting to relive isn't the part where I have to walk away from my computer, go outside, and take up smoking.
Am I saying this is a bad game? Honestly? No. Not at all. It's just that this is a TOUGH management sim to learn. It reminds me a lot of modern table top games where it's a good time but requires you to practically get a minor degree in it to learn how to play it first.
If you're up for that. If you're of the kind of mind frame where you can map out complex tasks and things like that better than my anxiety riddled ADHD brain can handle, by all means give it a shot. There's a demo available on Steam now and so feel free to give it a go. Maybe play it, get really good at it, and then find Pixigonal over on Bluesky and let me know how badly I need to get gud.
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