Indie Game of the Week 388: Frogun

James Clavell's 1975 novel Shogun saw its second groundbreaking TV adaptation just recently with Hiroyuki Sanada playing the Tokugawa Ieyasu stand-in Lord Toranaga (the titular shogun) and Cosmo Jarvis starring as Blackthorne, a British sailor based on the real-life historical figure of William Adams (also the protagonist of the first Nioh game; William, not Cosmo). While both adaptations are renowned for their acting and set/costume design, neither took the daring innovation to replace their entire cast with sapient frogs a la The Muppets and their literary makeovers of Treasure Island or A Christmas Carol. Frogun, by Spanish studio Molegato, is... not that. Rather, it's a game where a girl called Renata has a frog that acts like a grappling gun, hence it's a frogun. What a difference an extra G could've made.

Frogun's going for that sort of early polygonal N64/PS1 vibe with its visuals, the exaggerated cartoon style of its human characters specifically putting it closer to a Mega Man Legends to my untrained eye. However, in terms of level design it actually feels closer to the dioramas of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. You can jump, so it's not quite Captain Toad, but the way a manually-turned camera plays a significant part in determining a level's secrets is definitely closer in style to that game than its more famous 3D Mario cousins. Your main weapon is, of course, the titular frogun: it can capture enemies and items with its tongue, allowing you to toss them at others, and can also connect to solid walls and rappel you over. There's a small cursor that appears at whatever you're pointing at, either a faint gray or a solid red: the red indicates that it's close enough to latch onto. Beyond that, certain stages have their own gimmicks and monsters that have some inconsistent rules—many enemies can be defeated if you jump on their heads but the angle has to be just right or you'll take damage—and you just work your way to the end of a mostly linear set of courses. I say mostly linear, since this game is one with a heavy collectathon aspect.

The way the collectathon side of things works is that you earn an emblem shaped like a fly at the end of every stage. However, all you're earning is the base: the various jewels that make up its wings, eyes, thorax, and head as well as a ring that the base sits on all have their own separate requirements to unlock: the eyes and head are emeralds and obsidian skulls, the latter far better hidden and usually behind a small platforming challenge that's tougher than the rest of the level; the thorax is your no-deaths clear (I'm thankful it wasn't no-damage, at least); the wings are the time trial goal; and the ring is for finding all the other collectibles, which look like money and can number in the several hundred. It's made apparent early on that these are all optional but they give the stages quite a bit of longevity as you keep popping back in to procure the other targets—though ideally you should be able to do it in two: the first as a slow and steady collectibles run, the second for a faster time trial sprint combined with the no-deaths run since any death will cause you to lose time regardless. The time trial targets have been generous so far, which I appreciate since the game tends to be on the slow and sluggish side whenever you're moving: I think it's trying to incentivize using the grapple to get around quicker.

I'm surprised they found as much mileage out of the grapple as they have done so far, with various shortcuts available for the truly daring when taking on the time trial runs. For instance, the penultimate stage of each little "world" is a race against your rival, Jake, which eventually culminates with the exit and a shortcut back to the start of the stage for any collectible-scrounging, as that's something you can't really do when you're on the clock (and if you let Jake win while you're searching around, it just resets the stage like a death would). Sometimes, you can finagle your way up to this shortcut from the other side, finish the race within seconds, and then clutch a very easy stage and time trial completion both. The frogun needs something to latch onto at your current altitude to make this work but there are enemies and bouncy platforms that can be used to gain the height needed to cross the distances over to a much later part of the stage, depending on the level design. I've had quite a bit of fun just finding all these shortcuts and I think it's time well spent as there's hints there's a secret, much harder, time trial for each stage that'll only make itself known post-game.

For as devilishly tough as Frogun can get in the late-game for anyone seeking those emblems, it's incredibly fair for the normies just passing through with no particular designs on 100% completion. You can die as often as you want—unlike many throwbacks there's no lives, so you'll just start back at the last checkpoint every time; there's health upgrades every so often (though they will need partially- or fully-complete emblems to unlock); checkpoints also replenish health to full and falling into pits is the only hazard that leads to instant death, so you can damage boost without too much concern on many of those no-death time trial runs; all collectibles stay collected even after dying for convenience's sake, though you still need to finish the little obsidian skull areas before you're allowed to keep them; and the bosses, though their patterns tend to take a while to loop around before they become vulnerable again, are fairly approachable without too much in the way of cheap hits or hard-to-anticipate RNG. If I have any reservations about the gameplay it's in how it's not always easy to accurately aim the frogun in mid-air, especially if you're required to turn 90 or 180 degrees to the next target in the small window before you start falling, and the game doesn't always do a good job of "snapping" to the targets you want. You can only miss a grapple twice before Renata refuses to try again, letting you fall helplessly to your doom (and voiding an emblem run), and there are some surfaces (especially curved ones) that the frogun has trouble grappling onto. Minor precision stuff that only really becomes a frustrating factor for the diehard completionists and probably not enough to significantly damper anyone's enjoyment of the game in a casual sense. Overall, it's a snappy platformer with some neat gameplay hooks (literally, in a sense) and a strong PS1 "Legend of the Froggos" aesthetic where its leisurely gait does little to conceal its speedrunner-bait aspirations, all the while still being the type of cutesy action game anyone could enjoy.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, choosing to end the game on a boring boss rush followed by an even meaner version of that boss rush did take much of the wind out of Frogun's sails but otherwise it remained a solid, challenging platformer throughout. I've never been one for speedrunning and time trials but the way you can exploit the grapple mechanics to reach places you probably shouldn't made trying to beat those times more appealing than it would be in a game that simply demanded perfect execution instead (not that I'm about to compete with the likes of Grubb and Ryckert over that kind of thing; I've more games that need playing) and ultimately I really do still like that blocky PS1 aesthetic. Positive impressions overall. Might have to check out that Encore semi-sequel before too long.