Developer: Ryan Forrester

Publisher: Ryan Forrester

Played on: PC

Release Date: May 6, 2024

Played with: Mouse

Paid: $6.54

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Incremental games are an odd breed, in that they tend to be as much about what happens while you’re not playing the game as what happens while you are.  As I write this, Croakoloco is idly running on my desktop, with frogs happily hopping around and munching on flies, all while earning me in-game money.  Of the 50+ hours I’ve put into the game, less than half of it has been spent actively engaging with the interface and systems.  Rather, it’s effectively acted as a screensaver that I  periodically return to in order to acquire upgrades and more frogs, all in the name of progress.  Progress towards what?  Well, that’s the rub.

Croakoloco’s opening is rather simple: you start off with one frog, feed it flies by right-clicking, earning some money and experience in the process, and wait for it to get enough experience to grow up and start earning you passive income.  From there, you start buying more frogs, and the cycle continues.  Growing a frog to adulthood also unlocks its special ability, which may be anything from boosting the value or XP payout of flies to increasing the chances of pulling a rare frog.  Because yes, frogs are acquired through loot boxes.  There are no microtransactions, thankfully, and the game splits its frogs up into multiple “pools” to pull from; each pool contains twelve frogs of varying rarities, and once you find enough new frog species in your current pools, you unlock a new, more expensive pool to purchase from.  Better pools also come with better frogs, to the point where common frogs in the level three or four pool might start outpacing epic frogs from level one.  Interestingly, frog abilities are also ranked on the same rarity scale, and are completely disconnected from the rarity of the frog.  This means it’s entirely possible to end up with an epic rarity frog that has a common rarity ability, making it nowhere near as strong as some of your more common critters.  It can be an annoying system, as there were times where I spent thousands of in-game dollars making pulls from one loot box all in the name of acquiring the last epic frog to round out my collection … only to immediately sell it because its ability sucked.

That brings me to another intriguing feature of Croakoloco: you’re highly encouraged to sell frogs to recoup part of the cost and free up space in your tank.  At the outset, you only have one tank for frogs (two more can be unlocked as you progress) and limited ability to upgrade your holding capacity, so it rapidly becomes clear that creating a sanctuary for anemic amphibians isn’t going to cut it.  However, I think that Croakoloco starts running the player into those limitations a bit too early.  I tend to like incremental games for how they let you gradually build up an increasingly powerful engine.  The fact that Croakoloco centres around selling off parts of your engine to make long-term progress was paralyzing early on.  I had just gotten all these fancy frogs with varied abilities, and now I was being asked to discard them?  I struggled to decide how I wanted to nerf myself so that I’d be able to continue moving forward.  In the end, I did get over the hump, choosing to mostly prioritize selling frogs with common-tier abilities and low levels in favour of their stronger counterparts.  And I will say that once I got over that hurdle, things started to flow better.  However, it nonetheless broke my heart to sell off Top Hat Tony all in the name of making a quick buck.  Rest in peace, you dapper rascal.

In addition to buying new frogs from loot boxes, there’s another way to make baby froggies: breeding!  When two frogs love each other very much (read: you go through a menu and select them for breeding) they’ll create an offspring that inherits their ability from the parents and sometimes ends up even more powerful.  This could be in the form of a higher-rarity ability, or even having two abilities.  It’s a nice way to temper some of the randomness in the game, as while the baby’s ability strength is still a bit up in the air, you can at least guarantee what ability they’ll have if you breed two frogs with the same one.  The only downside is one of clarity: the game never tells you that each frog can only breed once.  Now, it does mark the parents as “mated” and hide them from the breeding selection menu, but it took a while to notice the former, and the latter made me think the game was bugged until I discovered the full story.  A simple notice in the description of breeding could definitely clear things up, though, so hopefully that changes in the future.

If you want to quickly level up frogs and earn more money, clicking on a frog to enter “Froggy Mode” is always an option.  In this mode, golden flies spawn throughout the tank, and eating them gives you bonus cash, five times the XP of a normal fly, and (if a frog in your collection has the right ability) spawns several regular flies for your other frogs to eat.  Annoyingly, you actually have to catch the golden flies, and sometimes they’ll spawn or fly off-screen and you’ll have to hop your frog around until you can find the fly and whip out your tongue.  On the bright side, the fact that golden flies can spawn in regular flies means that eating one can provide a healthy supply of food for your other critters.  Combining this with the ability of some frogs to burp up flies (accompanied by a stomach-churning sound effect that can thankfully be muted) meant that as the game progressed, it started to turn into a true idle game.  I hit a point where eating a single golden fly spawned more than 300 regular flies, meaning that after an extended period of time in Froggy Mode power-leveling some new recruits, I had more than 700,000 regular flies waiting to spawn.  The game takes mercy on your CPU and paces out these spawns (around 10 a second), but the side effect is that it can take a while for all that new food to appear.  In that scenario with the 700,000 flies, I went to bed, got up the next morning, and there were still over 400,000 flies in the queue.  I’d also earned around 30 million dollars with which to buy new frogs.  The only downside to this system is that switching tanks will delete all the flies in the queue, so if you want to keep the cash flowing in, you can’t manage your other tanks in the interim.  Despite that, while it starts out fairly slow, Croakoloco can definitely reach the self-sustaining heights of other incremental games.

Unfortunately, once I reached that point of Croakoloco basically running itself, I was pretty much out of things to do.  In contrast to many other games in the genre, this is an incremental game with a shelf life.  While games like Cookie Clicker make the simple reality of “number go up faster” into an appealing hook for hundreds of hours, after about 60 (and remember, a lot of that was spent with the game just idling), I had gotten 100% in Croakoloco and didn’t really feel a need to return.  There’s actually a prestige system in place that allows you to reset most of your progress while boosting the strength of all the frogs you buy in your next “run”, but it was so inconsequential that I was able to get all the achievements without ever taking advantage of it; it really feels like it’s just there to appease the true numberphiles in the audience.

Additionally, spawning flies sadly wasn’t the only time that bugs showed up.  Something that took far too much fiddling on my part was actually getting Croakoloco to run consistently.  For whatever reason, it decided to hate my laptop, causing me all sorts of grief in the process.  The issue was minor at first: some pixelated black bars randomly appeared on the screen, but turning off VSync resolved it.  However, after playing the game for a bit, suddenly everything locked up.  I restarted the game, but it just came up with a black screen that required me to kill off the task.  That was the death knell for Croakoloco on my laptop, as even reinstalling the game didn’t fix the issues.  Oddly enough, I didn’t face any of the same problems on my desktop, which is the only reason I’m writing this review now instead of playing something else while Steam processes my refund.  It’s also worth noting that I did reinstall Croakoloco on my laptop just now (a couple of weeks after release), and it seems to be working again.  So while the folks behind the scenes do appear to be doing a good job of cleaning up technical bugs, just know that you may still run into the occasional hiccup while playing.

My opinions on Croakoloco are confounding to me, in that I tended to think less of it the more interaction it demanded from me.  It’s a strange concoction: an incremental game where – particularly early on – you have to be interacting with it regularly to make any sort of meaningful progress.  And as is the case with so many incremental games, the interaction isn’t really that interesting.  It’s less banal than clicking a button over and over again, but in some ways I’d almost prefer that to hunting down golden flies as they swoop all over the tank.

That all being said, I can’t deny that I did find myself drawn back into Croakoloco time and again, at least while the content lasted.  Hunting down every last frog in the loot boxes was captivating, and getting achievements for specializing in different types of frog abilities really incentivized taking advantage of the breeding system.  I ran out of things to do sooner than I anticipated, but it means Croakoloco might be worth a look if you’re interested in an incremental game that doesn’t require you to make it your lifestyle.  If watching numbers go up is all you’re looking for and you’re a froggie fanatic, Croakoloco may just be your new addiction.  For everyone else, it’s a charming little incremental game that’s pretty good fun while it lasts, but likely won’t leave you feeling satiated.

7.5/10