Shipwrecked on a strange island by a terrible storm, you’ll need to trade with the strange, humanoid frog locals in order to fix up your vessel and get back to see. However, there’s quite a lot to see, and a LOT to do, during your Time on Frog Island.
Time on Frog Island is an interesting offering because it is designed with a few contradictions in mind. For a start, it’s not an adventure game despite appearances; there’s no combat in there, in fact, it’s almost entirely exploration and held together by strings of fetch-based puzzles. As well as that, it has the look of a charming slice of life game, and there’s no pressure to push ahead at any speed or pace, but it’s been loaded with items and careful design decisions to make it a natural fit for speedrunning. Regardless of how you play though, it’s a beautiful world absolutely brimming with charm.
I got to spend some time with Time on Frog Island at the recent The Mix 10th Anniversary Showcase, where I have to admit that I was surprised to see it being showcased. I was aware of Time on Frog Island Prologue — which had been released while the game was still being worked on under the previous title of Trading Time: A Croak Tale (changed in February of this year) — but I thought that the finished game was a bit further off. On the contrary, it was incredibly playable and I spent more time playing it than I did any other game at the show.
The plot is simple, you’re a little sailor who is marooned on a not-so-deserted island. In fact, it’s an island populated with frog residents who are mostly going about their own business. While you were unconscious several parts of your ship were either broken, as they were dashed against the shore, or were distributed around the island, and so you’ve got to set out to try and gather up or replace the parts of your ship that you were missing. First things first you’ll need to collect up your trusty friend, a pot plant, that’ll you’ll need to have with you every time you rest at a campfire.
From there though, the world is basically fully open for you to explore. You’ll need to fetch or replace items for the various islanders in order to exchange items that they have in kind, however, you can only carry one thing at once. This means that most of your time will be spent carrying… something, somewhere. And I imagine that when the final release happens I’ll play with a notepad by my mouse to make sure I can correctly chain the items required. You can actually see, in the trailer above, that the whole thing is based around the sequence of exchanging items in order to get your ship up to speed — something like that ‘trading a paperclip for a house’ thing that was going around, but with weird fruit, paint pots and the end goal being to get back on a seaworthy vessel.
It might sound quite repetitive, and, to be honest, one of the main things that people complain about in RPGs or Point & Click games is fetch quests, but there’s a devil may care mood about the whole thing, and it’s fun to just run off and explore to learn the island. In fact, I quickly learned that you can run faster while holding certain items, and that you can goad the animals of the island into following you… At that point Time on Frog Island started feeling more like a fun sandbox than a series of linear fetch-quest paths.
Time on Frog Island is expected to launch later this year, it’s currently listed as in development for Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS5, Xbox One (and Series S/X), AND Nintendo Switch.
