On the surface, Seafrog from OhMyMe Games looks to be a colorful action-platformer starring a skateboarding, wrench-wielding frog. As a fan of platformers and skateboarding games alike, I was intrigued by the prospect. What I was not expecting was a challenging metroidvania-esque platformer that would cause me much frustration and annoyance throughout my 15-hour playthrough.
To start this off, I want to say that if you are a fan of challenging platformers and games that test your patience, definitely give Seafrog a try. They are admittedly not my favorite subset of the genre, so where I found frustration, you may find enjoyment. And this isn’t going to be me boohooing the entire review, but I will try to paint a picture of how the game design choices cause friction at nearly every turn.
Before I get into that, however, I will start off by sharing what I think the game nails, which is the presentation. Seafrog has an art style reminiscent of games released on the Nintendo DS system; a combination of 3D models and pixel art. The game is very colorful and definitely leans into the seafaring aesthetic in its various nautical-themed levels. Outside of the static elements, the animation quality is pretty great. Seafrog flips and spins with its rocket-powered wrench in a satisfyingly smooth manner while enemies bounce and squish as you smack into them in an equally satisfying way.
The audio also deserves some praise. The sound effects that play when riding the wrench or grinding on a metal beam have the impact and crispness you would expect from a skateboarding game. Finding upgrades and collecting currency are accompanied by delightful and energetic sounds that go the extra distance in making their acquisition feel exciting. The music plays more into the punk rock skate game influence than the ocean-faring vibes the visuals present, which does fit the gameplay. It would have been nice to have a bit more variety in the tracks, as many are reused in different levels, and there was a bug I ran into frequently where level music wouldn’t trigger, leading to many times where I was just skating in silence. But outside of those minor complaints, the audio experience in Seafrog mirrors the visual quality well.
Narratively speaking, there isn’t much of a story in Seafrog. You start the game down on your luck and adrift at sea with your robot/AI companion, who pops up to comment on various interactions you have throughout the game with other characters. After falling into a massive seahole, you need to work your way through multiple floating ships to gather resources to upgrade a cannon that can shoot you to safety. That’s the long and short of it, there isn’t much of a plot here.
The characters are where the bulk of the storytelling and charm shine through. Outside of facial expressions, Seafrog is a bit of a blank slate for the player, but the AI companion is characterized as an old sea captain and has some funny dialogue lines. You also come across a time-traveller on vacation, a German TV screen that is constantly bored seeing the same room day in and day out, and even a ghost that is terrified of living creatures. Each of these characters provides some lighthearted interactions, and they are memorable in their own right.
From a presentation standpoint, Seafrog has a distinct and strong visual identity, and it ticks a lot of the right boxes for a cartoon indie platformer. It was this strong presentation value that kept bringing me back to the game to push further in. But now I have to talk about the gameplay, which was the part of the game that was trying its best to push me away.
Broadly speaking, the gameplay concept is not bad, and there are several areas of the game that offer up fun challenges that test your platforming abilities. However, there are several design decisions and implementation quirks that each feel a little annoying, that ultimately congeal together to form a rather frustrating game to play.
This all starts with the controls. You can use the left stick to walk with Seafrog, but this is fairly slow so what you spend the majority of your time doing is riding the skate wrench, which you initiate by holding the right trigger. The game is fairly streamlined in that skate tricks are completely automated, requiring few inputs from the player, unlike a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. While holding the right trigger to ride the wrench, you can hit the A/X button to jump, and releasing the right trigger while in the air will cause Seafrog to start performing tricks. Doing tricks will build up a boost meter, which you can activate by holding the left trigger. Grinding is automatically initiated by jumping onto a grindable object while holding the right trigger. There are also objects in the environment that you can press the X/Square button to grapple onto. That’s the very basics of the controls.
It might not sound too bad on the surface, and in theory, it isn’t that bad; streamlining much of the game’s control to a few buttons does help keep things simple while trying to perform well in the difficult platforming sections. However, there are a few things when it comes to implementation that cause the control to feel a bit inconsistent, which is not what you want in a difficult platformer that requires precise timing and jumping from a player.
I mentioned you charge your boost meter by doing tricks, well, as you may expect of a traditional skateboarding game, doing more tricks charges more of the boost meter. You can usually get a jump trick in and combine that with a grind or two, but as soon as you touch the ground, that combo ends. There is a manual system in the game where you extend your combo on the ground by pressing and holding the right trigger again before hitting the ground. However, the window for hitting this manual sweet spot feels off somehow. I think it either activates too close to the ground or higher than I would expect which even after 15 hours it felt like I never really could get a handle on performing it consistently, which is problematic and makes things extremely difficult when trying to preserve momentum for a challenging line or scoring points in a trick attack style challenge. If this sweet spot was increased a little or if it was perhaps tied to a different button like RB for instance, I think some of these issues may be sanded off.
One cool aspect of the gameplay is the fact that Seafrog can ride on both the floor and the ceiling of various parts of each level. This really opens up the level design and allows for some creative platforming challenges that incorporate boosting and switching between floor and ceiling in fun ways. When it works properly. Specifically around curved sections of ceiling, I found the game to get a mind of its own. Depending on which part of the curve (upper or lower) you come in contact with will determine which direction you start riding in, and like the manual, the sweet spot feels a bit ambiguous and hard to successfully pull off what you want to do consistently.
For example, there are several challenging lines that appear after speaking to a character known as the Ratty Godmother. These are sequences that require a specific line or combo to be pulled off as there are spike traps and explosive barrels covering every other inch of the play space. Hitting one of these hazards will cause an instant restart. There is one in particular that starts with a boost jump on a curved ceiling, and I would say a good 40% of the times I would make this opening jump, Seafrog would shoot up in the opposite direction into a set of spikes, despite the feeling of pressing the buttons on the controller feeling identical to what I did the other 60% of the time where I would go in the proper direction. And when the game is asking you to perform very specific platforming, inconsistency leads to aggravation because it feels out of the player’s control. You are able to perform a quick turn type move on the ground, but you are not able to perform this while grinding, which would also lead to several instances of taking damage or running into hazards placed in your path.
To touch on the hazards, Seafrog takes notes out of the Sonic the Hedgehog book of placing spikes and enemies in your path constantly to bring your movement to a halt. As you learn the levels you start to memorize where specific hazards are going to present a problem, but when you are in that flow state where the movement is clicking and you are launching yourself all over the level, there is nothing more annoying than launching right into a singular spike ball placed right in the arc of your jump bringing that fun to an end. Not to mention the fact that oftentimes you get completely stunned when taking damage and won’t be able to regain control of Seafrog until you touch the ground… even if the ground is several floors below you on a larger level.
Branching off of that, I want to talk about death in Seafrog and how weirdly punishing it is in a multitude of ways. In the game, you start out with 3 hearts, and taking damage removes one heart, pretty standard stuff. When you lose all your hearts, any currency you are currently holding is dropped and picked up by a pufferfish creature. Any items you are holding are not only dropped but returned to whichever room they were picked up in (even if that is on a different ship). You are then teleported not the the beginning of the level you are on, but to the main hub ship that serves as your launching point to reach the other ships. There is a teleporter machine here that can send you to specific areas of the various ships, but frequently, you will die in a spot of the ship that is a few rooms away from a teleporter, so just getting back to where you died becomes a laborious experience. Not to mention having to backtrack to other specific rooms to get an item you may have dropped for a puzzle solution you were working on. And on top of that, that pufferfish enemy who pocketed all your money runs away whenever he spots you getting near, so now you need to get involved in an extended chase sequence just to get your cash back. Once all of that is overcome, you can then go back to attempting whatever it was that killed you in the first place.
All of these factors combine into something that just feels overly annoying and punishing. I mentioned at the beginning that Seafrog is a bit of a metroidvania, so there is an expectation there that you will explore other parts of levels to find items used in other levels to progress. Because of this, the decision to only be able to hold one item, and on top of that, drop it upon death, feels poorly thought out. Being able to store items like machine parts feels like it would remedy a lot of the pointless backtracking and frustration that stems from needing two or three parts to power a machine and having to take the parts to the machine one by one. Same with the greedy pufferfish enemy. If you are already being tasked with getting back to where you last perished, having to chase after an enemy that feels like it’s always just faster than you just isn’t very fun. If it were a little slower, it would be a bit more manageable and less of an annoyance, but as it currently stands, most of the time, what would happen is the creature would run off-screen into some other hazards and damage itself to death anyway. Death was so much of an annoyance that I found myself actively leaving a challenge I was attempting to go find health and return because the amount of time it would take to reset after a death would have been the larger hassle. In the Ratty Godmother sequences, you spawn right at the start of the challenge path, but there are several other challenging moments of the game where a forgiving spawn is not the case, and you are sent multiple zones away.
Now seems like a good time to bring up mod chips. These serve as upgrades in the game. Mod chips alter attributes like the amount of health you have, the total amount and speed afforded to your boost meter, how many points you receive for doing tricks, as well as unlocking the ability to interact with magnetic walls and bumpers in the environment. You have a set number of slots you can set mod chips into, which you unlock more as you play. Mod chips also have bonuses and debuffs based on which color of chip they are slotted next to.
The mod chips do help in some circumstances, I usually incorporate some kind of health bonus in order to stay alive a bit longer. But especially in the late game, I found myself going into this menu quite frequently to switch out chips for specific situations, and that felt a bit clunky. And while modifiers like extra health or speed were helpful, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to not include some other mechanically based tweaks in here, some that could even address other criticisms I’ve made, such as increasing the manual sweet spot or perhaps not dropping your currency on death. As it currently stands, it is helpful and serves as a fairly nice upgrade system, but I think the decisions you have to make are very circumstantial rather than feeding into some kind of different playstyle.
Once you finally make your way through all of a ship’s various rooms, it ends in a boss fight against a large creature. Initially, the boss fights seemed like a fun challenge where you get to skate around to various parts of the arena, dodging hazards and enemies to score a hit on the big bad. Unfortunately, the excitement fades because this is the main structure for each of the boss fights in the game. There are different platforms or different hazards that can cause the boss to move in each fight, but the mechanic and strategy of “find the boss, deal damage, repeat” makes all the fights feel the same in essence. I enjoyed the over-the-top designs of the bosses, and I think it serves as a nice bookend for a level, but ultimately, they left me unsatisfied on the whole.
The last thing I should touch on is bugs and performance. For the most part, Seafrog ran well, I didn’t notice any sort of framerate drops or hiccups at all during the 15 hours I played. However, I did run into a couple of bugs during that time. I already mentioned the weird music trigger issue above. During some of the challenge runs for the Ratty Godmother, I found that holding the boost / the riding button right as I would respawn would send me flying forward much faster than I believe is intended. These are relatively minor, but I did come across a soft lock in the game. As you play, you are powering up a cannon to launch yourself to a seaplane on the top of the sea hole. There was a moment where my crosshair was brought in the direction of the sea plane for the AI character to comment on it, and I was able to launch myself out of the cannon despite not having the maximum amount of power the cannon required, and this caused the game to soft lock and required a restart. Thankfully, the game autosaved before that. So while performance is pretty solid, you may run into a couple of weird bugs while you play.
In conclusion, I’m very mixed on Seafrog. Presentation-wise wise it has a lot going for it, and there are several moments where I found myself having fun and wanted to return to see where it went. But at the same time, it felt like at every turn, there was some mechanic or implementation issue that would be very annoying or some challenging platforming setup that just felt more aggravating than fun to overcome. While playing the game, a patch was released that included a Balance note listing “Several level updates that make some areas less punishing overall”. I think it’s a good sign that the game is getting updated to address some of these pressure points, but I think some more tweaks are needed in order to make the game truly live up to its potential. Seafrog is available now on PC via Steam. A review code was provided by the publisher.
