Seafrog

Skating games occupy an awkward space between sports and platformers. Since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999, these games have carved their own corner of both genres, emphasising open levels replete with ramps, rails, and gaps to encourage the player to tackle increasingly more difficult environments to showcase their mastery of the game. Seafrog has all of the elements of a classic 2D skating game on paper, showcasing the side-scrolling grinding and tricks that made OlliOlli World such a delight. However, there’s a Metroidvania element in its level design that makes it stand apart but maybe a little behind others in its class.

The game starts with a wide shot of the protagonist frog with a giant wrench tucked under their arm, seated in an oarless rowboat in the middle of the ocean. A digitised captain speaks to you from an oversized thumb drive about how your luck is going to turn around. And then you plummet down a waterfall. It’s the kind of silly early 2000s platforming story you know and love, with well-timed humour and punchy writing. Within 5 minutes I couldn’t help but fall under its charm. The art design recalls the early low-poly era but with the refinements of modern artistry to make the polygons really shine in each animation. Bright colours, snappy controls, and plenty of rails to grind in the first few moments make for three compelling reasons to sink comfortably into your chair and get going.

Down the waterfall you’ll fall into a physics-defying ocean well where there are four unseaworthy ships in need of repair. Climbing onto the first one, you upload the captain into its mainframe and get tasked with repairing the ship’s cannon so you can explore the other ships trapped down here with you.

These ships are composed of hulls and stages, marked in the tried and true world-level system but arranged like nesting dolls. Each of the four ships has multiple hulls with 4+ stages each, and you have to dig deeper to get to each ship’s final boss. Each hull’s door is locked behind a number of leaks, indicated by green lights above the door’s frame. You have to find broken sections of the hull and ratchet them closed with the wrench to open passage to each vessel’s depths. Leaks can be anywhere, from the main hull hub with doors to each stage or within stages themselves. I spent a lot of time checking rooms, consulting my map, going back to previous stages and hulls to access previously unavailable areas, and when armed with a new manoeuvre, hunting down more abilities that would allow me to progress deeper towards each ship’s boss.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Metroidvania game design is at the core of Seafrog. It’s overstuffed with a massive collect-a-thon of door keys, gears to power up machines, and ability modifiers, and a whole lot of backtracking. As I got deeper and deeper into the game, the initial draws faded into the background. Stories came more irregularly. The animations still sparkle and crack a smile, but having to return to a teleport point to deposit currency, to load a cannon to blast to a new area, and to rinse and repeat the whole process while digging for an ability modification you knew you needed but had no general direction to obtain grew to be tiresome.

I realised too late into my playthrough that environmental hazards took a toll on your health meter, a feature I didn’t even notice until the first time I died. I found this to be the most cumbersome system added to Seafrog. There’s already a massive crisscrossing between ships, hulls, and stages to locate items you have to carry, one at a time, to unlock paths forward. I imagine that if I could track my movement from each place I had visited, I would have a thick, woven doormat of red strings across the hubs of two different ships before even reaching the first boss. Environmental hazards stall this pathfinding on their own. But dying to a mistimed jump, a tracking projectile, or running out of boost when crossing a gap means you get punted to the Med Bay at the first ship’s hub, and you have to trek back to the item you dropped and then redo the section that you died in. Fortunately, there is a fast travel system. In each ship’s hull, there is one stage with a teleporter. From the main ship, you can return to any teleporter you’ve discovered. 

But having to manage a health system with the skating system ultimately felt like using slippery manoeuvres in levels designed for tighter platforming, especially considering that the player isn’t equipped with a great combat system to clear rooms of enemies. Factor in the verticality of many levels, and the initial buzz of skating freely and racking up big point combos all but disappeared, which was only found in specific challenge stages. Dying also means that the main currency you gathered would be stolen by a treasure goblin character, and if you tracked it down (usually in the stage where you died), you can kill it by grinding on it then boosting to recover your lost money. It’s not technically a corpse run, but it’s close. To be transparent, my drive to finish the game had dissipated, and by the time this review was due I was unable to finish Seafrog despite having made significant progress.

But some of the appreciated exploration of a Metroidvania and character upgrades are in here too. Finding a challenge room to smash all the rats within a timeframe to unlock a mod or racing to hit the end of a stage before an enemy caught up to you were two of my favourite things to do. There’s a fair amount of animal squashing, which was immensely satisfying, and I welcomed the bite-size challenges that deferred to the game’s skating. Seafrog has plenty of nooks and crannies to find items and modifiers for your skateboard wrench. Power-ups are easily measurable and feel significant when applied. There’s enough customisation to make builds personalised to the player’s preferred style of play and plenty of options to choose from. Mods were welcome and common incentives for exploring the corners of each stage or timing a boost to an optional corner. By the time I did fight the first boss, which was an excellent setpiece and balance between skating and platforming, I had nearly unlocked half of the available mods and could tinker with a build that made sense for the challenge.

Despite my frustrations with what I felt like was contradictory game design, Seafrog has reeled me back in time and time again with its upbeat, humorous writing and stellar animations. It’s such a joy to watch our skater-mechanic seafrog do whatever they’re doing in any given moment. The various characters you met along your journey conform to their game’s nonsensical but hearteningly silly atmosphere, leaving you with a smile, even if behind that you grit your teeth spending more time platforming and less time skating.