Seafrog (PC) Review

May is here, and with it, we're now less than a month away from two special occasions, both occurring on June 5th: the Nintendo Switch 2's launch and SuperPhillip Central's 17th anniversary!

Before we dive into a new Nintendo console generation and celebrate 17 years of gaming together on SPC, I do have lots of content coming your way.

Let's start off with Seafrog, a recently released Metroidvania with a super-cute visual style and some sick tricking potential. Here's the SuperPhillip Central review.

Stick to the pond, Froggy.

The indie space has no shortage of clever concepts and meshing of genres and gameplay types. Seafrog fits the bill marvelously here. Combining the gameplay stylings of something like OlliOlli World meeting Metroid, Seafrog is a 2.5D platformer that takes players along for a seafaring adventure. While the game has a ton of heart, charm, and creativity to it, Seafrog's execution is unfortunately where it stumbles quite a bit.

The story behind Seafrog sees our protagonist, a wrench-wielding frog who uses said wrench as a makeshift skateboard, and his companion--the hologram head of a pirate captain--are adrift at sea. Suddenly, they go topside over a giant waterfall into a mass of water, something of a ship graveyard with various vessels in close proximity. Fortunately, refashioning and fixing up one of the ships allows our heroes to jettison themselves to each vessel remaining, via cannon. The catch? The cannon on their ship can only fire so far, so massive amounts of gold nuggets need to become acquired to power it up so it can shoot them to further away ships, and thus, eventually, a cannon to blast them out of the ship graveyard itself!

Ridin' on a wrench--the only way to travel!

Seafrog's gameplay has you skating, grinding rails, leaping up halfpipes to get big air, and performing tricks while you do all of it. Bailing isn't a thing, as like a cat, our frog protagonist (...frog-tagonist, maybe?) automatically lands on his wrench even if he's upside-down with only an inch between him and the ground--he always lands right-side up. That said, it's quite easy to get frustrated with the physics and platforming. For one, taking damage while in mid-jump/in midair results in the seafaring frog's body to become totally limp and for the player to completely lose control of the character as he falls. This means you're stuck watching this, getting increasingly more annoyed the higher you fall down from--seeing all the time, effort, and energy it took to get up there--wasted. It'd be great to be able to maneuver and try to course-correct, but sadly, this is not a thing.

That notwithstanding, Seafrog does otherwise feel and play nicely. The Zen-like flow you can get from chaining together combos, jumps, and wallrides is as feverishly addicting as something out of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater or OlliOlli World. The areas in the game are set up in a way that feel natural to explore and keep a combo going. Really, Seafrog doesn't bail when it comes to the controls or feeling as if the game has a good flow to its gameplay. It succeeds here.

Platforming challenges like these abound within Seafrog's four ships.

There are four main ships within Seafrog, and the game is designed as a Metroid-structured game. The more new abilities you gain, the deeper inside the various ships you can go and explore. The gameplay loop essentially has you exploring a ship you enter, tightening up loose bolts that serve as your means to get into the next hull, or hub of rooms. The deeper you go in each ship, the more challenging the platforming and tasks become, but the more rewards in the form of new abilities and those ever-important gold nuggets are there for the taking.

"Bawk" at its name all you want, but the Chunky Chicken is one hazardous place!

However, rather than automatically learning new abilities you stumble across, most of them you're required to equip via MOD chip. Not only do you have precious few slots for these chips, which replace other helpful functions like gaining additional health or boost speed, but every time you need to switch the chips out, it's a drawn out process of equipping and un-equipping them from the inventory menu. 

Regardless, outside of this niggling annoyance of futzing around with equipping MOD chips, they have their uses. and thankfully, not every new ability that you learn throughout the game comes in the form of a MOD chip either. Whether it's a midair boost that thrusts Seafrog forward to cross otherwise impossible gaps, riding along the sides of specially marked walls, or bouncing off of circular bumpers, there is quite a bit to teach our hero. I guess it shows that you can teach an old frog new tricks. ...Ahem.

Being a Metroidvania, as you can imagine there is some backtracking to be found in Seafrog. In fact, I would argue there is way too much of it by virtue of only being able to hold one item at a time, whether that be a key to unlock a door, a gear to activate a mechanism, or what have you. Understandably, this gets quite frustrating when you stumble upon item after item, but can't carry them without dropping your currently held one. A pocket system of some kind would have worked wonders and brought down these "moments of tedium that quickly into long stretches of obnoxious backtracking" immensely.

Furthermore, perhaps feeling the need to take something from Hollow Knight, death is punished by having all of our skatin' and thrashin' frog's current stash of nuggets stolen from what is essentially his corpse by a gremlin character. You, upon returning to the land of the living, must track this creature down, chase his goofy butt down, and attack him enough times to have your nuggets returned to you. This feels like a shoehorned inclusion to the game that serves no real purpose but to annoy the player. If you want your gotten gains back, the process of tracking down the gremlin means you must return all the way back to where you died. Fine enough, but seeing as every time you die, you start back at your ship, instead of a more convenient spot--it adds up, both the tedium and the irritation.

Our froggy friend grinds on this rail with perfect eggs-ecution!

The map isn't necessarily the most helpful to look at, just being a bunch of squares and rectangles depicting concepts of rooms, and not the actual shapes of the rooms themselves. With how "samey" a lot of each ship can seem, it's easy to forget where certain points of interest are. There is fast-traveling, which is very welcome, though the issue with the map really shows how difficult it can be to know and remember where to transport yourself to.

On the presentation side of Seafrog, we have graphics reminiscent of something out of the PS1-era, chiefly resembling something like Mega Man Legends. You can't go wrong with that kind of art style, and Seafrog doesn't go wrong with it either! It's fluid and it looks fantastic. The same goes with the frame-rate, which held up while playing Seafrog on my Steam Deck. The game is currently, as of the time of this review, listed as "Unknown" with regard to its verification status, but it truly runs well on Valve's portable. While the visuals look fabulous in Seafrog, the sound design is simply serviceable at best and completely forgettable otherwise. It's merely "there".

I entered into Seafrog with high expectations, but in the end, no matter how creative and charming this game presented itself could belie as anything else but a frustrating experience. Between moments of severe backtracking (whether because of repeated deaths or fetching items), the confusing map system, or the camera locking up, preventing me from seeing my character as he was far off screen--requiring quitting out--there are too many downsides to Seafrog to wholeheartedly recommend. That bums me out, as I really wanted to love this game. Instead, Seafrog threw a wrench into my plans, and not the fun kind that he skates on, either!

[SPC Says: C-]

A code was provided to SuperPhillip Central for the purpose of this review.