Games of the Abstract: Frog Fractions (2012)

 

Developer: Twinbeard Studios

Publisher: Twinbeard Studios

One Player

Flash / Windows

 

[Huge Spoiler Warning: The point of Frog Fractions is as much pure surprise from what you progress to. This review will include full spoilers, so play this game first if you wish to still have this surprise; thankfully, this is a game you can play with ease on PCs.]

Frog Fractions is more of an interactive farce in what was originally a flash animated game format. Its creator Jim Stormdancer, after a series of older games he developed created an absurd jaunt through genres, with no game-overs but only having to figure out how to progress. Contrary to its title, it is not edutainment, merely under the veneer of mathematics education where, at a pond, our titular frog has to gulp up insects with his tongue to prevent them eating his fruit; the score is kept in mathematical fractions. The joke something is amiss is found before you even leave the lily pad, in how when you unlock new tools, you can turn on and off lock on technology to the point an over-extended arguments for and against end up turning into a discussion on waffles.

The tale of Frog Fractions is seemingly innocuous even still by this point, up until you acquire warp drive in the unlockables and can venture up into the cosmos, right into a parody of a scrolling shooter and the game moving on from there. Frog Fractions is a gimmick game, which is far from an insult; even this extended joke is impressively when if you know the punch line for how many genres and moments this gets into. The jokes have aged at points, showing their time period when, as your frog decides to become President (and ruler) of the entirety of a planet of bugs, it has a parody of the opening to The West Wing, a popular American series in syndication from between 1999 to 2006. Others have stayed funny because the genre they referenced, the text adventure section, were obscure and deliberately there to baffle me let alone a younger person at the time exploring Flash games.

Scrolling and shooting insects eventually causes one to be arrested, but you have the luck to avoid being shot into the sun as a crime by becoming a bug citizen, all done in a quiz where any answer, even screaming about everyone being a bug, is the right one, among the jokes which still land. Baring some interactive sections, this is mostly an interactive story, one where the genre changes are instead deciding how to progress to the next chapter, the puzzle how to turn the page of this game metaphorically, with a few sections showing imperfections even if they are harmless. One great example of the later is how the rhythm game parody, of the dancing game Dance Dance Revolution to win bug presidency, is a mess to have properly beaten to win, any level of accuracy thankfully still a win and the scene able to still be a good one, legitimately, because it thankfully found a way to make the technical problems not a hindrance but the gag. Surprisingly there is one bottleneck which could cause some to struggle, and it is entirely because Jim Stormdancer picked a genre which was obscure back at this time, which is the text adventure section. This is not the game's fault, but that the text adventure, from the earliest days of gaming, involves purely text and builds a world you can interact but with the restrictions from that structure, that it offers its own challenges even for this very simple version. The predecessor to the point and click adventures, what typed commands are accepted before you get the puzzle of operating the bacon goop machine becomes the one potential challenge for any gamer, even next to the fun tangents into Frog Fractions teaches typing, a potentially fun arcade game in itself; you are having to figure out objects going with others in unconventional ways but also now with the idiosyncrasies of this founding gaming genre.

Most of Frog Fractions, though, is trying to figure out the progress without this additional challenge. Even cheating is part of the mechanics at one point, with the parody of Lemonade Stand, a 1973 business management game created by Bob Jamison, involving manufacturing insect planet pornography; destroying the planet's economy through inflation, by printing all the money you need, is an acceptable plan then trying to win in the simple business management simulation, with no consequences whatsoever. Again, this is a farce, ending on the credits with a metal instrumental over photos of insects strategically blurred to look rude, and from its origins as Flash game, this was meant to be an experience first as an interactive work meant to make the player laugh and play with bafflement. Adobe Flash animation was animation software produced by Adobe Systems Incorporated, existing between 2005 to 2020, and among its many uses, from animation to video games, it was capable of great creative work but also used to create silly short pieces, interactive or not, to make people laugh and create memes, to which Frog Fractions, from late in the cycle, proudly succeeds in doing itself. Its imperfections do not undercut its best moments, such as a sequence merely swimming underwater on Mars to your destination, whilst a narrator explains the origins of boxing, originally a sport derived from when men regaled boring tales at each other until one fell over, the punching rule a controversial one brought in later and superseding the original ones.

I admire it as a clever piece of interactive silliness, if aware of its limitations. Honestly, the hype of the game's legacy, becoming a sudden hit to circles who would find it, is its biggest enemy, because it puts on too much weight on a work which is at first a silly game, even with its parodies from the period to the limitations of the gameplay, and works even if you know the spoilers for its weirdness. The game was like catching lightning in a bottle, but I wish to still view it as the curious independent production which you return to once in a while. As I have by its original browser version and now, when Flash was discontinued in 2020, by Steam for free, I can appreciate the game returning to it in periods of time, return for the punch lines and the absurd tangents this gets into. It was a work meant to befuddle and it works, and the legacy from this became as well how Stormdancer felt he had to follow it up. They deserve their own days at the lily pond. The tale of the fabled Frog Fractions 2, by way of being housed in another game Glittermitten Grove (2016), is its own curious multimedia spectacle. Frog Fraction's downloadable content for the Game of the Year version, Hop’s Iconic Cap (2020), is seemingly a hat for your frog, which poses a question of how to review merely a DLC for a character accessory, but I suppose it is a really big hat and worth its own review.