PC
I’m going to tell you a secret. But you have to promise not to tell anyone else, because it’s pretty awkward. Promise? OK. (I’m kind of done with the whole “wholesome games” thing.)
It’s not the concept of a game being wholesome! That’s lovely. It’s the branding. The idea that there’s something inherently hallowed about not including specific aspects of wider gaming, as if not featuring combat or conflict elevates something to a more spiritual level. It is a title that unequivocally states there’s something “unwholesome” about all the other games, and as such it’s piety. I also dislike the restrictions it puts on a narrative, and that brings me to why I so love Frog Holm.
Frog Holm is a third-person adventure about a young adult frog called Filip, who is returning to the archipelago home on which he was raised to take over a pub left to him by his late uncle. On arrival, Filip discovers the building is closed up, the power is off, and even the local lighthouse no longer shows its illuminated sign. When he finally meets someone, she’s a threatening, chain-smoking frog who demands Filip immediately fill his backpack with ingredients for crafting cocktails.
Filip has a backpack with 21 tiled slots into which tessellating ingredient items can be placed. These plants, mushrooms and insects are gathered by playing a micro-game in which you click tabs on a swinging meter in time, and then need to be arranged inventory-tetris-style into his pack. These, in turn, are then used in the cocktail-making minigame which involves dropping the correct-shaped pieces into a glass such that their tiles match up to a given design – something made all the trickier when the insect tiles don’t stay still. In any other game like this, that would be your steady, core loop.
The chain-smoking frog eventually breaks character and reveals herself to be Ingrid, one of your closest early-childhood friends, now a teenager and part of a rebellious gang of jet-ski-driving ne’er-do-wells, the Jetski Juveniles (Crocheting Club on Tuesdays, Bioterrorism Discussion Space on Wednesdays). She catches you up to island events, including the disappearance of your late uncle’s husband, whose drinking problem means this isn’t the first time he’s gone missing for days at a time. But Ingrid is convinced something else is up, and as well as convincing you to make her intoxicating cocktails, draws you into her conspiratorial adventures of strange facilities and excessive toilet roll orders.
As such, on many levels, Frog Holm has all the ingredients of your standard “wholesome” game, albeit with an odd leaning. You have your regulated farm/shop/boutique in the form of the pub, you have your required puzzly elements with ingredient gathering and cocktail crafting, and you have the obligatory range of characters to chat to as they come to the pub and order drinks. It’s even cheeky enough to describe itself as a “cozy” on its Steam page. But this peculiar and splendid creation hides multitudes.
This is the difficult point of the review where I want to tell you why the short game is so much more than this suggests, but also don’t want to take away from you what I was able to enjoy discovering myself. So as ever, I’m asking you to trust me.
As a third-person exploration game, Frog Holm is at its weakest. The jumping feels slightly off, and while the 2D backdrops are beautiful, the 3D environments are rather bland. And for some reason you’re a frog that can’t go in water. But push all that aside, because it’s not really the point. This is about experiencing a completely barmy story, intermixed with cocktail crafting, and it’s absolutely not heading in any direction you could ever expect. That’s the real pleasure here.
It’s also not the kid-friendly game it might look in the screenshots! The swearing is partially asterisked, but there’s loads of it. The conversations handle adult topics like alcoholism and death in adult ways, without moralising. It feels irreverent about complex topics in a way that shows a depth of maturity. It’s also very funny.
It’s that maturity that has stuck with me. That this is a cozy-game rug-pull is a treat, but despite only being two or three hours long, it’s the characters who have really stuck with me long after finishing. One frog called Liv especially, who in most other games would be played as a cranky old lady to patronise, but here is a force. I once knew a Liv – Jean her name was, she died at around 90, and I only met her when she was in her 80s, and she was the most splendid curmudgeon I ever spent so much time with.
Oh, and this is the first game I’ve played not only to get into the scrunching/folding toilet paper debate (something I once raised in PC Gamer‘s They’re Back section some 23 years ago), let alone one that almost convinced me to change my lifelong mind on the matter. I mean, it’s hard to find a higher recommendation than that.
- Ostend Games
- Steam
- £7 / $8 / €8
- Official Discord
All Buried Treasure articles are funded by Patreon backers. If you want to see more reviews of great indie games, please consider backing this project.
81
