I think we, as a society, need to sit down and take a good, long, HARD look at what it means to enjoy nostalgia. I’m not trying to diminish the experiences that everyone had playing games during their formative time; whether you started in the 8-bit era, if you cut your teeth on a PlayStation 2, or if you’re someone who unironically got the Nintendo Switch as their first system, it’s where you resonate at your core. So retro-inspired games make sense because you’re trying to capture that vibe while also bringing something new to the table. However, I think Frogun Encore went a bit too hard in the direction of recreating the moment, because this game has done an excellent job of underlining everything that we’ve been working to get AWAY from.

If you’re like me, you didn’t know that Frogun was an indie title from 2022 that was made by Molegato and published by Top Hat Studios. To be perfectly honest, I figured that Frogun Encorce was building off some obscure PlayStation 1 title that I missed because I was wasting time on Final Fantasy Tactics. But no, Frogun is a very recent game where you play a girl named Renata who has to defeat a bunch of flies that answer to a big fly named Beezlebub, because subtlety is dead and gone. You have a gun that is a frog (hence the title) and you use it to grab enemies, grab vases, grab ledges and basically grab everything. You play through levels, find coins, and occasionally square off with bosses who provide their own downfall by accidentally knocking things loose that (you guessed it) you grab and throw at said boss.

Weird that you guys can build a Killdozer but can’t handle a literal child with a frog.

Frogun Encore just picks up three years after the first game ended on a different island with similar stakes. Now a bunch of evil flies are trying to resurrect Beezlebub, which seems like a waste as they’re perfectly capable of concocting and executing evil plans without him. Now that some time has passed, Renata (and her friend Jake) are older, wiser, and have a few new moves that I can’t totally appreciate because I didn’t play the first one. In any case, you’ve got a slew of coins, jewels, and notes to find as this polygonal, skewed platforming collect-a-thon launches your forward into a weird and sometimes frustrating world.

Frogun Encore is divided into multiple stages with the same objectives for each. Run through the stage, get rid of enemies, collect coins, and finish the round by finding the insect medallion at the end. Along the way, there are two emerald eyes to put on the medallion, an obsidian skull that complements the medallion more, and notes that reveal a bit more about the bad guy’s planning. Oh, and coins. Each and every stage has hundreds of coins, and yes, they expect you to collect them all. Failure to do so…has no real penalty, but you want to feel 100%, don’t you? You don’t want to end a round feeling like a failure, now do you? That’s right, so you missed three coins, get back in there, and do the whole thing over again.

See that? Nine coins! NINE PRECIOUS COINS. BACK IN THE MINES, TIMMY.

The improvements to the handling of Renata and Jake are something that makes me openly question how well Frogun classic handled. Besides jumping around, the double jump is now available and makes a lot of traversing much easier. The double jump does come with a caveat: a single jump allows you to jump and then shoot your frogun at a wall/object to do some midair acrobatics. If you double jump, you cannot then shoot, which feels like a decent but unexpected tradeoff. I mean, it’s not like the act of somersaulting is any more difficult than simply existing in this world, so why must we sacrifice the additional element? The mind reels.

Each stage is broken into multiple areas where you are at the mercy of depth perception and a constantly moving camera that you cannot control. Almost every section of each level has a different vantage, which the developers either decided on because it’s the most coherent or the least, I genuinely cannot tell which. You have to usually climb small pedestals across gaps or up to larger places, and you need more leaps of faith than even George Michaels could bear. Touching spikes, fire, enemies, or explosions will cost you a bit of your health, but stepping into the void or water is an instant “death” and a restart at either the checkpoint or the beginning of the level, whichever is most recent.

Renata “drowns” in eight inches of water, so she floats and just thinks about life for a while.

I will admit, there’s some charm and interesting factors to Frogun Encore that I see peeking through time after time. The music is very cheery and chippy, playing in constant, upbeat loops to really emulate the atmosphere of a 3D platformer from the turn of the century. There’s enough of a blockiness to nearly everything that you feel like a kid, and the fixed expressions for the characters that change like swapping a Noh mask is endearing. The use of coins to purchase incidental hats that show up in each level was enough to get me on board with collecting at least some of the loot in a stage, and I did appreciate the level design. There’s a lot of coherence and good choices made in the crafting of Frogun Encore.

Which is probably why I’m so upset and confused at keeping the camera locked in place at almost arbitrary angles. I get that the game is supposed to be difficult, and I think that was already successfully done with the controls and handling of Renata/Jake. There’s a touch of float to all their movements, especially the jumps, and the targeting reticle on the ground only gives you a very vague idea of where you’ll land during descent. The aiming of the frogun is a tricky thing, and players need to make important decisions about turning on auto aim or not. As a positive, it locks to the nearest object which is USUALLY what you want. Inversely, it’ll also lock onto a stray vase or enemy when you’re trying to, say, jump across a gap and grab a pole that’s four pixels further away, and thus you die.

Frogun, if it wasn’t for you, I would have swallowed my own tongue years ago, thanks!

Both of those things can be conquered with time and effort, but your improvement on them is hamstrung when you’re also dealing with not being able to move the camera so you can better see where you’re going. This is some real “mom knows best” stuff where the developers are acting like parents who claim their POV is the only POV, and, in this case, it is. Not allowing players to swing the camera leaves us scratching our heads when the next step seems obfuscated thanks to interference on the screen. I have no idea how easy or difficult it is to implement camera movement for the players, but we are lacking out here.

Lastly, I cannot understand the need to prioritize things like a speedrun mode in your game. Of all the acts, this one seems the most hubristic simply due to the implication. Almost every game has speedrunners, we know it’s a vibrant community, and it’s both impressive to witness and wildly tricky to execute. But Frogun Encore already feels like a game that was rushed out half-baked. Due to the design choices, I can’t tell if it’s glitchy or made that way, but visuals are sometimes lacking and, at times, just bad. The controls leave something to be desired, and the aforementioned camera is such a pain. So for there to be this option to do speedrunning on the main menu is just very presumptuous.

Though I do love that they let you do Insurrection cosplay for the game!

Star Fox Adventures is a title my friends lauded and I simply could not get behind because collecting every single thing in existence isn’t really my cup of tea. Super Mario 64 is a fantastic game that allows players to collect if they want a bigger experience, but ultimately doesn’t matter for fun and delight. Frogun Encore hammers home, again and again, the necessity to pick up everything, and that feels almost mean spirited when the game is so unprepared to handle the people playing it. As much as I enjoyed the moments when the game loop clicked, there were so many more points where it didn’t. If you want and need to burden your life with perfection in an imperfect scenario, be my guest, but don’t be surprised by how often you croak.

Frogun Encore is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Frogun Encore was provided by the publisher.