Recent reviews by DinoMom

The game is very fun with friends when it works, but it does suffer from crashes, glitches, and connectivity issues, so keep that in mind.

Previously I had given this game a negative review, because Sony was pushing a PSN account on players after having advertised the game as not needing such a security risk. They reversed their decision, and with it I have reversed my review to (hesitantly) positive.

Keep in mind that they could force such a change at any moment without the developers' or players' consent.

I like this game a lot. The characters are very cute, the level design has a nice ebb and flow in difficulty, and while the game only has one song in its soundtrack, I never grew tired of it across the 50 levels to play. If you are looking to get into precision platformers like kaizo or celeste, this is a pretty good entry point, as the difficult is on the lower side.


Some criticisms that could be changed to make this game, or a follow up game more of a success for me:

- The coconut hitbox is pretty small, making the direction it travels in feel mostly controllable, but also a bit random. Taking player momentum into account to decide which direction the coconut travels in could help a lot.

- Transitioning between screens doesn't feel that great because there is very little pause time to evaluate the state of the next screen. This is exacerbated by the fact that the position of a coconut on screen 2 that has been kicked from screen 1 depends on how the coconut was kicked, so you have to make a very fast evaluation as to how to proceed, which feels unfair and not very interesting.

- The hydration meter is way underused. I never died to this mechanic and it was a selling point for the game! A difficulty mode where the axolotl drying out a lot faster could fix this pretty easily.

- The game is pretty short. I beat the game in about 1.5 hours, which is not that much time for a 10 dollar price tag. However, looking at some of the other reviews for this game shows play times around the 7 hour mark, so I think I am alone in this.


Great game, and best wishes to the dev.

I've played about 3 hours into the game and I'm two thirds of the way through the game at the moment. The tl;dr is that I would give this game slightly positive praise in its current state, with some caveats.

The first and biggest caveat is that this game has no music. A set of simple 8-bit songs would really go a long way to selling this game's vibe, which is that of a slow paced platformer you might find on DOS or on an Atari. I really like the super retro vibe here overall.

The second caveat is that the game is very slow paced. This might not be for everyone. I think if you approach the game as a very difficult, slow paced precision platformer that's going to offer you a sort of meditative experience, it's definitely worth a try, especially for its asking price.



I think there are a number of ways the game could improve on the experience it's trying to deliver, at least as I see it:

-add music to the game. The sound effects are wonderful, but I think 15 or so quality 8-bit tracks would really sell the experience of the game.

-Increase horizontal player speed slightly when the player is in the air: right now the player moves at the same (or very close to the same) speed as the projectiles. This means that the only way to avoid collisions with the bullets is by jumping towards the bullet, which is not always viable. Increasing the horizontal speed would give the player more options to avoid the projectiles in the game.

-Increase the vertical fall speed significantly, but allow the player to use the current fall speed by holding a button (fast and slow fall). I love that this game doesn't have a jump button. Thinking about how to use the springs to traverse the level and thinking about when you should mount a spring to avoid obstacles is a lot of fun. However, once you are on a spring you are kind of sealed in your fate because you lose control over your vertical height once you are on a spring (in most situations). Having two fall speeds that the player can control would give the player more options.


-Either eliminate the wall clips from the game, or adjust how the arrow tiles work after you have clipped onto a wall. Currently there is a mechanic in the game where if you hold the direction into the wall, the player will stick to the wall. I say mechanic, because the level I am on (71) does not feel possible to complete without slowing down your speed with a wall clip. I think it is likely that the developer is aware of the clips and has incorporated it into their level design. This is fine (and it gives you much needed control over your movements), but I would suggest making a couple of changes if this is the case.

The first is that if you ride the arrow tiles into a wall and get a clip near the top of the arrow tiles, you currently sit on top of the arrow tiles with no way to gain momentum; this causes multiple soft-locks in the game. I would suggest that if you interact with the top of an arrow platform with zero speed, that the arrow tile give the player a negative speeds so that the player can sink down to the ground, allowing the arrow tile to accelerate the player again.

The second suggestion is you add levels early on that require wall clips to progress. It took me until level 71 to feel confident that this is a mechanic embraced by the developer. I should feel confident that the mechanic is intended by level 5.


-Decrease the acceleration that arrow tiles give you considerably. Currently, two arrow tiles stacked on top of each other gives you so much momentum that you slam into the ceiling, but one arrow tile doesn't give you that much momentum to really work with. Decreasing this acceleration would help the game's precision considerably.

-Decrease the waiting time throughout the levels. The player's ground speed is very slow. This is fine, as you aren't running on the ground very often or for long periods of time. However, there are some levels with a long period of running to the first obstacle. This is unnecessary and just adds waiting time on every death. Another thing that could help with the waiting time is to reset the on every death. Some obstacles only have 2 configurations that are really viable, which means waiting a long time for an opportunity for the player to make their move. If the levels reset on death, this would ensure that the player arrives at the obstacle at the same cycle of the obstacle's animations every time.


-Make the collectible pellets meaningful. Right now the game does not tell you if you have collected all of the pellets in a level. Adding an indication that you have collected all of the pellets to the level menu would be a good way to encourage the player to engage with these collectibles.

I like the idea that pellets don't reset on death and that you can sacrifice some lives to get pellets. There is one level early on (level 27) where you cannot die once you collect the coin. Adding a gun that can shoot you at that location would be good so that all levels can have all coins collected in one play session.


-improve the level menu and the in level menu. There is a level early on in the game where the level menu did not open at all (the game did pause though). That definitely needs to be fixed. The level menu should track which levels you have beaten and should start on the most recently unlocked level. At one point my level progress got desyned and there were two levels I hadn't beaten yet that were available to play. I don't know how that happened, but you might want to track that down.


-This one is more of a personal preference, but make the death effect a pixel animation instead of a particle effect. The rest of the game has a beautiful retro aesthetic, and the particle effect is a bit jarring. A wonderful explosion of bloody pixels would be fantastic. :)


Overall I think the developer has done a decent job so far in making this game. The game definitely has good bones to make a really fun game. It just needs some polish. :)

At its best, a rogue-like deck builder presents its players a space to learn its mechanics and learn how to prepare for the challenges that are to come. The fun comes from building skills in planning, strategy, and an understanding of the games mechanics. The best games in the genre offer new players a challenge that is <probably> surmountable for a player who does not yet know what they should be preparing for, encouraging good habits and offering greater challenges for those that succeed, until the game is at a difficulty that only the diligent student can surmount.

As a roguelike deckbuilder, Wildfrost utterly fails to accomplish this goal. This game offers no board for players who are struggling to attain wins. The game does such a fantastically bad job at offering learning opportunities, that most players who struggle will wash out.

Worse yet, players who finally achieve their first wins in the game are rewarded with... making the base difficulty setting even more difficult by replacing the final boss with one that will need very specific strategies to counter. Compounding on to this, the Leader units in the game are randomly generated and you are presented with a choice of a single Leader from each clan. So while the boss you are preparing for may need a specific mechanic to counter, you are only presented with a single a choice of Leader for the clan that offers those mechanics to the table. You may need the clan with snow or maybe ink, but fun times ahead! The only Leader unit you get to choose from that clan may not be able to fight their way out of a paper bag.

Even for the players who breakthrough the game's hostility toward new players, the deckbuilding aspects also leave much to be desired. Charms are extremely high variance, only being offered 1 at a time in most circumstances. The game does not present the player with enough information to prepare for the challenges ahead, so deckbuilding often feels like mitigating negative scenarios that may never even occur. Unless the player high rolls a highly synergistic combination of materials, builds rarely feel cohesive toward a single strategy. And with few card remove opportunities and no option to decline card drafts, decks often bloated with the "least bad option".


None of these characteristics necessarily make the game "bad". But they do make the game aggressively hostile toward players who are new to tactics. The game in its current state feels like what a deckbuilder should feel like at the end of the players journey to learn the game. If the player comes to the game already knowing the skills they should be learning from the game they are probably going to become die-hard fans of the game. But few others will spend much time here in its current state. The game in its current form is headed toward a small population of dwindling super fans, and that sucks for the developers and for the players who want to enjoy the game.

These problems can be surmounted by the developers, should they choose to do so. The developers could introduce features which make the game easier to learn, and then offer the removal of that feature as a "difficulty bell" for higher ascensions. For example, charms could be a 1 of 3 choice to new players, but the 1 of 1 returns at higher difficulties. Ditto that for Leaders. New players could be alerted to a losing game state, and experienced players could remove that alert as a difficulty option. There is a lot of room here to offer a game that encourages players to keep learning the game. Unfortunately, if the developers listen to the die-hard fans, these options will never see the light of day.

In its current state I cannot recommend this game to the average fan of the roguelike deckbuilding genre.

Simply put, the game is promising. Starting a ranch on an alien world, researching plants, and taming alien livestock is a fun loop. You can build simple buildings, improve the QoL of your survivors, and eventual embark out to an alien world searching for resources and exploring the world around you. The game also offers pretty robust gamepad support if that appeals to the player (it appeals to me).

The game is not without problems however. There are graphical glitches (the roofs of buildings have a tendency to refuse to render); the gamepad support also needs a little bit of work. For example, after making a click and drag box around items, you have to press left on the dpad before the game focuses on the management window to choose what you want to do. If you press down right away, you bring up the main actions command window and your selection box disappears. The solution here should probably be to automatically focus on the management window after making a selection box (after all, what else would you be doing after making a selection box?). Polishing off the UI and fixing the graphical glitches would go a long way to bringing the game toward a finished state.


Overall, I recommend. Ranching on alien world good, yeehah. Looking forward to the devs adding more content and smoothing over some of the rough spots.

Frogun has a great platforming concept that is implemented well and has great level design. The levels are short with plenty of checkpoints (so far only one level has a section that feels too long), plenty to collect, and very cute aesthetics. Each level has a challenge room that presents quite a tough challenge, and each level can be time attacked as well. With cute outfits, a bestiary to fill, bosses to beat and more, it's definitely a game that is worth your attention.

It's like minesweeper with more advanced rules and no "randomness". Every puzzle can be completed with logic. The free version offers enough levels to last you about 3 hours of playtime, which is plenty to decide if you want to buy the very reasonably priced additional level packs,

The additional level packs claim to come with new mechanics and not just "filler" content. If that's true, this game could offer 50 hours or more of puzzle content for under 20 dollars (with more content coming each month for 0.99 USD).

I am confident with the game in its current state to recommend it.

Some really great roguelike mechanics here, and some quite fun ideas as well. It's a bit like a monster train - Slay the Spire baby, and while those are big shoes to fill, the devs are putting in the work to help this game live up to its potential.

The level painting mechanic is a nice reprieve from the standard "choose a path along a tree" that StS made a mainstay mechanic way back when. Each of the characters are feel very different, and as do each choice of two of the 4 characters.

I would definitely buy this game and check it out.

There are a lot of bugs in the game (examples: sometimes attacking the enemy just do anything, there is a structure that gives units +1 HP, and if it is destroyed, 1 HP units will be invincible).

The game also has a lot of balance issues. There are a lot of enemies that can basically stop you from being able to make any moves. This just isn't fun.

At the end of a game, you and your opponent will have nothing to do and you often are waiting 5+ turns for the game to finish even though the winner has already basically been decided. This combined with the balance issues is frustrating and boring.


The core game play mechanics are fantastic, and there is a great game here, somewhere. But the above would need to be addressed before I could even think about recommending the game.

The game has only gotten better since I reviewed at 23 hours of play time. New bosses, new champions, and a new faction on its way. If you like StS you will like this game. Give it a try if you like card games.