Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge reminds me of a more fleshed out version of Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector, but with a bit more depth and meaning to it. In Kamaeru, you must bring frogs to your frogland, so that they can rest and gather some tasty bugs for you, but at the same time you’re also developing wetlands!
Kamaeru has you taking a break from your office job to help your brother out. He, along with a retired surgeon, is building a nature reserve for frogs. You can purchase different types of furniture to tempt frogs to your garden, where they will play. Once you see a frog, you can take a picture of them to add to your journal and feed them different bugs. Each frog has a set of four bugs that they like to eat and you have to feed them in that order to tame them.
Getting bugs isn’t too challenging, but it does require you to invest in the wetlands. Kamaeru wetlands are separate from your frog refuge. There, you can place out plants and ponds (to then give the plants water). You will also attract both frogs and bugs in this area, along with different ingredients that you can use to create jams, lollys and more. It’s actually a very valuable place to invest in between getting bugs and crafting to sell to get more coins! The cooking element of the game has you selecting ingredients, then turning on the pot, moving some dials to get the solar panels charged, and stopping cooking at a specific time to make your creation.
These can then be sold in the shop at your refuge, to spend on more items. It’s also worth mentioning that the wetlands has a sort of research tree, allowing you to unlock different plants and more ponds through researching how they’d affect the wetlands. This gives you an aim and a bunch of stuff to unlock, as you wait for more frogs to appear.
Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge does have a lot of spawns coming quickly, so you won’t get bored, though it’s much more challenging to have enough bugs to feed them. If you do tame frogs, you can breed them, doing a sort of tic-tac-toe game to see what traits end up in your newly born frog. It’s all about increasing the reputation of your refuge through breeding and adding more stuff, so that you can attract more NPCs and frogs alike.
Kamaeru feels very relaxing and the hand-drawn graphics are just adorable. There are so many different colors and patterns on the frogs too — making them well worth collecting!
You can currently play the demo of Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge on Steam and wishlist the game ahead of its release this year.
