Frogging Up: Frog Climb Rage Game Review (Xbox Series X|S & PlayStation 5)

”I’ve got a feeling we’re not in the swamps anymore, Toto.”

Frogging Up: Frog Climb Rage Game is anything but a jolly ol’ trip down the yellow brick road. It’s a dual carriageway of pain, suffering, and endless misery—a treacherous path that, weirdly, is also surprisingly fun to walk. It isn’t fun in a conventional sense, but it is annoyingly rewarding, especially when you’re able to persuade yourself to relish each and every milestone atop its gargantuan labyrinth of floating objects. Is it a perfect storm? No, but it gives you something to feel proud about — and that counts for a lot here.

The swamp is but a mirror of poverty—a reminder of a past life that has since taken its toll on your waning ego. The skies, however, resemble change, hope, and an ideal anchor point for new beginnings. As a frog in a yellow raincoat, it simply falls to you to reach it. You don’t know how you’ll get to the top, nor do you know what the journey will entail. All you know is that, between the swamps and the clouds, a mirage of nonsensical objects and unorthodox pathways block the way to the apex.

If you’re familiar with rage games à la Egging On, Getting Over It, or A Difficult Game About Climbing, then Frogging Up: Frog Climb Rage Game ought to feel like a bad memory unapologetically repeating itself. A good memory, perhaps, provided that you actually spent enough time traipsing the treacherous corridors of each world to find the final checkpoint. But for most—the players who have an awful habit of abandoning their posts long before the halfway mark—it’ll likely feel as if the worst possible events from past collisions are beginning to happen all over again.

The idea, much like the one in the aforementioned rage-oriented cult classics, is simple: ascend from the murky swamp waters of a boggy trench to the grand and seemingly pristine skies of a faraway haven. As a frog, you have a relatively straightforward goal: to master the craft of jumping, and to prevent yourself from accidentally falling back to the pits of a swamp. And no, you cannot activate checkpoints along the way. If you miscalculate your actions, then you’ll need to start from the beginning. But that’s textbook rage-baiting malarkey for you, I guess.

In any ordinary case, jumping as an amphibian would be an easy task. But in Frogging Up, irritating camera angles and strict controls prevent you from caressing the skies and gallivanting around freely. Herein lies the first major hurdle: the camera. See, in order to complete a jump, you need to aim the camera in the right direction and manipulate the strength of your leap simultaneously. In other words, it isn’t as simple as tapping a button and flowing through the motions. Every action that you take here requires precise measurements, skill, and a pinch of luck. And if you do happen to fall to your death, well, it’s best not to dwell on the consequences.

Behind its rage-inducing mechanics and world design, Frogging Up presents itself as a vibrantly engaging game with a huge amphibious heart. While not the cakewalk that you want it to be, it does follow through with some oddly satisfying moments that can keep you entertained for the long haul. The crowd, for example, cheers whenever you overcome a tough feat, as does it reprimand you for making slight mistakes. Granted, the booing is slightly more common than the cheering, given that you spend most of your time on your face than your feet. But again, that’s a rage game, in a nutshell.

The world itself is spawned with a lot of familiar yet nonsensical bits and pieces. With there being no path to the apex, what you essentially have is a cluster of random objects to clamber over, with each of them having their own shapes, sizes, and reasons to thwart your progress and knock you from your podium. A pickaxe, a floating container, or a labyrinth of narrow pipes, for example. It doesn’t make any sense, though it does keep you on your toes and forever guessing the next set piece.

Of course, Frogging Up’s bizarre world design is both its best and its worst feature. While it provides a good bouquet of floating obstacles and trick-able paths for you to carelessly volley over, it does also fall into a similar pattern as most rage games of its kind. With objects that look, spawn, and essentially act the same, it can be awfully difficult to differentiate between Frogging Up and any other rage game on the market. The amphibious touch makes for a neat addition, but other than that, it more or less plays like your typical floating obstacle-centric platforming game.

If you can embrace a game like Frogging Up with a grain of salt, then you should be able to bathe in the brief moments of platforming bliss that it occasionally coughs up on a frog-shaped platter. That being said, it’s best to expect the worst with a game like this. True to the point of a rage game, it thrives on rage-baiting antics and frequent failures. If you can gloss over that and learn to roll with the punches, then you might just find an entertaining little indie game here.

Verdict

Frogging Up: Frog Climb Rage Game keeps to its promise of delivering a simple, tedious, yet weirdly engaging obstacle-centric platforming experience that can extract the sweat from your forehead and the blood from your knuckles with ease. Conceptually, it doesn’t do a lot more than your standard rage game, as it mostly relies on a lot of the same level designs and tropes. But, to give credit where it’s due, it does make for one of the better rage games on the market. Maybe it’s the yellow raincoat, I don’t know.

If you have the time and patience to spare, then I’d suggest giving Frogging Up: Frog Climb Rage Game a fighting chance. Don’t expect a brilliant game, mind you, because you probably won’t find one here. But what you are likely to find is an annoyingly adorable game that can both elevate your palpitations and give you a heart attack at the same time. If that isn’t worth a few bucks, then I don’t know what is.