Time on Frog Island Reviews

si

i cannot figure out where the hell to go or what the hell to do. i must be damn stupid

Exploring the island, learning what you can do with objects in the environment and listening to the game's soundtrack, was genuinely fun for the first few hours. After that introduction, however, it was a test of patience to finish the game even while referencing several guides given by other users. In a game with so few points of interaction, I found several of the clues and objects to be shockingly misleading. Examples include: 1) The player never sees the artist frog without a hat, yet the image meant to indicate her is shown without a hat. 2) The very feminine frog seems to indicate wanting something that looks like a crystal ball, but there is no such item. Perhaps more frustrating, the item she does accept causes a matching picture to be shown. 3) The crabs which inhabit the island never meaningfully interact with any quest, nor are they useful for anything. 4) Lilypads and platforms of floating ice both play musical notes when jumped upon. In other games, this usually indicates a puzzle or a challenge to jump on all of them, but apparently is never needed to progress or get any achievement. 5) There are ropes in various places. These can only be interacted with via a tongue-grab ability, despite being given an erroneous button prompt when moving near them. These, also, never seem to be needed or useful. Even if you are not actively misled, progression can be confused by inexplicable absences of information. Examples include: 1) Despite being able to talk to the knight frog on the first day, he will not make his request known unless the player speaks to them after the first day. 2) The fisherman seems to not display his request if you haven't already inspected the wrecked ship... which has nothing to do with his personal predicament and he wouldn't have even known if you did or not. 3) The blacksmith will hammer endlessly at his anvil, very obviously "working" on no metal or object, but can not be persuaded to begin work on a rudder for the player's ship until, again, other unrelated events elsewhere on the island have happened. These are all opportunities for false negatives, where the player might mistakenly believe that further interaction with these characters is impossible. The frog-folk and their tadpole-like pets are cute. The sound design and environment are inviting. A few pleasant elements, however, does not constitute a worthwhile game. I would prefer to praise Time at Frog Island as the exploration of nonverbal communication, or of bartering systems, that it seems to want to be. Even the loading screens hint at a story about overcoming loss of a loved one. But overall it was a disappointing or even baffling execution of those ideas. I would have been very upset to have paid the full price for so little content and I think most users, at whatever price, would be justifiably dissatisfied.