Quick Rec

Frogger: Walkable City

“Frogger: Walkable City” is a bite-sized RPG-Maker game about a world where Frogger is allowed to live. Its absurdity is instantly captivating, its humor is sharp in utilizing the RPG medium in profound ways, and the emotional core of the concept is gut wrenching. It manages to toe the line where such compliments are both facetious and justified. I recommend going in without any preconceived notions, stop reading here and play it yourself.

Here’s a few light-spoilery thoughts anyway: “Frogger: Walkable City” is a fantastically balanced tongue-in-cheek adventure. The individual bits, of which there are about 10, are each wonderfully unique, utilizing RPG tropes such as fetch quests and random battles in delightful comedy bits, exploring multiple genres in vignettes and at one point even building a set piece out of nothing but exceptional use of sound effects. I can’t recall the last time the solution to a puzzle hit me like a truck in a way that left me laughing before even trying to see if I was correct. It was just so funny that it had to be.

Yet just past the endless jokes is a story that anyone can relate to: the soul-crushing experience of co-existing in a world of automobiles. So too do we yearn for a world where DMVs are a curiosity. So too do we dream of a world without parking lots, where our streets are occupied by farmer’s markets, our children can walk to school without fear, our casinos occupied by only the rumbling of the wind, and our frogs untrodden by weird 8-bit race cars.

Sadly, that is all we can yet do: dream of such a future. Until then, play “Frogger: Walkable City.”