Game Impressions: Frog Detective 1; A Short Hike; Yu Crossing Animals

[mysterytoast]

Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island

Began: 2/7/2025
Completed: 2/7/2025
Playtime (100%): 0.5 hours
Bought as part of Humble Bundle’s Australia wildfires bundle back in 2020, and in usual fashion it sat in my library unplayed for years. Played through Steam.
A silly game about a frog detective who solves the mystery behind some mysterious noises heard around an island. Despite what the name of the game and the protagonist would have you think, there wasn’t a particularly notable amount of detective work going on. It’s mostly fetch quests and wandering the island looking for a couple easter eggs and things that distort funny under the magnifying glass. The magnifying glass isn’t even technically required to beat the game and was mostly me amusing myself. I definitely felt out of the “ideal” age range for the game considering the lack of complexity in the gameplay and text.
Aside from that, the presentation was good. The models and lighting hit a good spot between being simple without feeling low quality, the animations felt like they had care put in them (they rigged multiple dances), the textures were silly and had plenty of visual jokes. The music was really great! And there was a point where the dev popped into the game to give an Educational Warning Fact Checking The Validity Of A Character’s Opinion, which I found amusing.
Overall, nothing particularly outstanding or life changing but it was a decent use of half an hour.

A Short Hike

Began: 2/7/2025
Completed: 2/8/2025
Playtime (16 feathers): 1.8 hours
Received for free via Epic Games Store; I also have a copy from the itch.io BLM megabundle back in 2020. Played through Epic Games to track playtime.
I really enjoyed this! It’s a cute little game about taking a hike up a mountain, and there’s also about a dozen side objectives you can do as well. The movement feels intuitive and enjoyable, and by the end I was flapping around on 16 feathers and the silver feather and just that was a lot of fun. The dialogue and character interactions are also well written - they’re pretty short and to-the-point overall, but still have plenty of personality. I enjoyed seeing some characters make repeat appearances.
The music was also great! The track that plays when you take the updraft from the very top was especially nice, but in general I thought the soundtrack really fit the atmosphere and just naturally flowed into each other.
My only complaints are that playing on mouse and keyboard (really just keyboard) was kind of painful. You only have the 8 directional keys and that works fine overall, but it definitely would have been better with full directional movement. Also, the camera was also finicky to deal with - it changes perspective automatically, but doesn’t seem to be fully consistent about when/where it shifted. This didn’t make it unplayable, but it did detract a bit from the experience.
Overall, the game definitely didn’t overstay its welcome - I scoured the map pretty comprehensively and that still took less than two hours. I also looked up the (in-bounds) speedrun and the 100% feathers speedruns and those were 2 and 10 minutes respectively, so yeah, it can be a really short hike if you wanted. I’m not really someone who replays singleplayer games, but this is the kind of game I’d be willing to return to at some point - it’s short and uncomplicated, nice to look at and listen to, and apparently the dev even added a skip-through-dialogue option so you can go directly back into exploring.

Yu Crossing Animals

Began: 2/12/2025
Completed: 2/12/2025
Playtime (100%): 1.4 hours
Free porn game on Steam. There are 7 sex scenes (plus the “sprint” buttplug, home masturbation art, and a couple bonus sketches). The sex is entirely F/F (several characters have cocks) and largely focused on masturbation and anal; there is one scene with vaginal penetration (it’s also reused in the minigame) though it’s effectively masturbation on a mechanical dildo. A couple scenes involve worm-like things and oviposition, but otherwise the kinks aren’t particularly out of the ordinary.
Fairly short overall, but pretty good. I liked the artstyle a lot. There are a couple spots that obviously feel like there could have been additional scenes, and the town itself feels a bit too empty, but the game is free so I won’t complain much about it ending so abruptly (though it really does).
The 100% is pretty easy with one caveat - one of the achievements is to *have* 10,000 gold at once. You need more than that to finish the game, but it’s split into multiple purchases that you can make as soon as you have the money. Don’t do that. Get the achievement first or else you’ll have to grind out the only minigame like 10 more times. It took me 20 days to hit the 100%, but that was because I spent all my money and had to start from scratch; without that, I completed it in closer to 12.

Currently working through a couple longer games, one of which I’m basically two fights away from completing but I’ve been putting it off because I wiped on the first of them due to a silly reason. Unfortunately I hear Against the Storm calling my name and that will suck me into a completely different type of gameplay completion metric (playing until I get bored of it and shelve it).
Also, I should circle around and put down my thoughts on FFXIV 7.1 at some point. I enjoyed it and I enjoyed the base expansion, but I need a touchstone to look back on in retrospect.