Summary

• Step into the idyllic world of Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge for a cozy, cute gaming experience with adorable frogs to befriend.
• Discover over 500 unique frog species in the game and immerse yourself in the peaceful gameplay of transforming natural biomes.
• Pay attention to biodiversity and carbon footprints in the game as you create a balanced frog refuge and enjoy the charming, eco-conscious gameplay.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge was one of the bes🦂t games I saw at PAX East earlier this year. As ꦦmy very first appointment at an industry convention of this ilk, I was incredibly nervous walking up to the Armor Games booth to see these cute little froggies for myself. Thankfully, French developers Aurelien Condomines and Melanie Christin were kind as could be as th⛎ey eagerly sat me down to show off their adorable farming sim. With Condomines working on the programming and Christin on the artwork, it was clear from the outset this indie could be something special.

You play as Cleo, a young woman who’s burnt out from her desk job and is headed back to her childhood home for a visit to unwind. Meanwhile, her old friend, Axel is hard at work creating a frog sanctuary with the goal of turning depleted natural biomes back into flourishing, biodiverse utopias. Because this is a cozy little game about frogs, it doesn’t ta🧔ke long for Cleo to get stuck in.

You start off with only four of eight frog species unlocked, but there are still plenty of different critters to find. Each species of frog in the game has two colorations, with each color operating as an individual genus you’ll need to spot out and about in the worlds you’re renovating. Doblex Aqua Peach frogs are not at all the same as the Doblex Aqua Pink frogs, after all.

Cleo keeps a Frogedex handy, a growing photo album of all the frogs she’s photographed or befriended, with roughly 500 unique combinations to discover. The goal of the game is to befriend each kind of frog, which you can do by feeding them bugs they enjoy. At first, you’ll have access to four spe♎cies of bugs – flies, caterpillars, beetles, and dragonflies – and each species of frog has a pairing it prefers when it’s snack time. You’ll need to keep an eye on what each frog likes and dislikes, which adds a nice layer of strategy to this otherwise chilled, fairly simplistic experience.

Frogs don’t count as fully logged into the Frogedex until you’ve befriended them by giving them their bugs of choice, but you can use your camera to keep track of what you’v🤡e seen!

After settling in, Cleo and Alex agree to work together to rejuvenate the area and create the most peaceful frog refuge they can. Wetlands are the only available area when you begin, but eac♎h of the three total biomes has its own biodiversity scores and requi🍷rements.

Plants you place around ponds will slowly but surely produce byproducts, which can be processed into goods and sold for cash. In the wetlands biome, you’ve got berry bushes, reeds, and cattails to work with, unlocking the ability to turn them into homemade artisan goods like jams⛦, candi💦es, paper products, and more. Once you’ve processed the spoils, you can head back to the frog refuge and sell off your wares and use your earnings to buy upgrades, trinkets, and ways to customize your refuge.

As biomes grow, so do their human populations, with new characters with unique skills attracted to the refuge as it develops. There are four characters who show up to𒆙 help as you play through the wetlands, but their introductions and individuality are a bit limited. Each character is introduced with one screen that says they’ve shown up to the refuge, then a second screen of them saying hello to Cleo and Axel, before they’re unceremoniously just there for the rest of the game. I know the focus is on the frog friends, but I would have liked to see just a little more from the human pals we made along the way.

Every plant or pon🌌d you place in a biome contributes to its bioscore, a meter🐠 that tracks how self-sufficient and balanced the local area is. You’ll need to check in often to be sure you’re placing decorations in an ecologically balanced way – too many of one item and not enough of the others will throw your biodiversity entirely out of sync, which in turn makes the area unappealing for new frogs.

If there are any frogs you’re unable to find in the wild as you replenish the biomes, you can speak with the local breeder. Anabelle will show you how to engage in a tic-tac-toe game against nature itself to decide what kinജd of tadpole your two parent frogs create. But with breeding costing precious 🐟coins, I found myself ignoring the mini-game for the most part in favor of spending that cash to expand the wetlands instead.

Mini-games like breeding or the ones you’ll need to play in order to produce crafted goods are fine, but they do become a bit repetitive. New buildings and areas unlock new mini-games to play, but with so much focus on the biomes themselves, I wound up speeding through them to get back to the main attraction out in the ponds. The constant need to keep an eye on your bioscore means non-stop awareness of the carbon footprint you’re creating, and the mechanic adds a unique layer to the game. I may be guilty of placing way too many berry bushes around a single pond when I first began playing, assuming I’d earn a fruit fortune quickly before realizing I’d thrown the wetlands’ ecological balance comp✃letely out of whack.

I left the demo at PAX East eager for the completed game, and now that I’ve played it, it delivers well on the idyllic simplicity of building ponds and befriending frogs, even if the simplicity is a bit too simple at times. I’ve neve⛎r seen a game put so much effort into making an actual statement on ecology and biodiversity, but Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge shows 🍷a cute game about photographing frogs can be so much more than that.

A review code was provided by the publisher.