Developer: Humble Reeds

Publisher: Armor Games Studios

Played on: PC

Release Date: June 8, 2024

Played with: Mouse

Paid: $0 (Key provided for review)

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Despite being the year of the dragon, in the world of gaming, 2024 is starting to seem like the year of the frog.  Between Frogsong, Croakoloco, and now Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, my gaming life this year has been full of froggy friends, and I can’t say I’m disappointed.  Frogs are lovely little critters, and getting to check out more games where they play a starring role is always a delight.  In the cases of both Frogsong and Croakoloco, the results were games that, while not perfect, were still compelling and enjoyable experiences.  The question is: does the same hold true for Kamaeru?

Kamaeru starts with a girl named Cleo meeting up with her childhood friend, Axel, who’s decided to construct a frog refuge.  Cleo opts to help him out, and together they found the titular Kamaeru frog refuge.  Eventually, the refuge begins to draw more attention, leading to new helpers with different specialities being brought on and eventually other reserves being founded abroad.  It’s a simple premise that does a pretty good job of providing some context for the game’s many objectives, and while none of the attempts to flesh out the characters ended up resonating with me, it was nice to see some effort being put in on the narrative side instead of leaving it completely up to the player to come up with their own motivation.

Building up the refuge to attract different types of frogs is the main goal of Kamaeru, and there’s a whole host of furniture to do so.  Whether it’s chairs for frogs to relax in, logs for them to climb on, or even a bathtub to soak in, there’s lots of different options available to craft your ideal froggy paradise, and seeing the ways in which the frogs interact with them is super charming.  Not all the furniture can be interacted with by the frogs, but thankfully there’s a helpful icon in the shop to show you which pieces are purely decorative and which ones will actually provide new places for frogs to hang out.  Regardless of which types of furniture you place, though, each unique piece will contribute towards your reputation level, which can be used to unlock new objects to place, advance the story, and more.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t very clear to me that only unique pieces gave reputation, so there were a few times where I bought multiple chairs of the same type to set up a little sitting area, only to find that most of them didn’t contribute anything to my reputation.  I understand why this system was put in place: it prevents players from spamming cheap objects to rapidly level up their reputation.  However, I wish it was explained better rather than being something I only noticed after placing a whole bunch of repeat furniture and getting no rewards for it.

Attracting frogs to your refuge doesn’t fully catalog them, though; to do that, you’ll have to tame them.  Clicking on a frog will bring up their information and allow you to feed them a selection of four bugs (different frog types need different bugs), after which they’ll be tamed, scoring you a small reputation bonus in the process.  This also unlocks the frog for breeding, which takes the form of a tic-tac-toe-like minigame where you play against the computer and attempt to make lines of different traits (pattern, primary colour, and secondary colour), guaranteeing those will be passed on to the offspring.  The catch is that the computer arbitrarily selects traits to place on the board from the traits of the parents, and any traits that aren’t locked in via the breeding minigame will be randomly generated.  While this does a good job of simulating the vagaries of breeding, it means that getting a specific frog out of breeding is next to impossible, with the only other option being waiting until it spontaneously shows up in your refuge.  This gets compounded later on, when special colours are introduced that can only be obtained via what amounts to a dice roll after the initial breeding process.  You can try to increase the likelihood of getting these special colours by selecting parents with certain other colours, but you’re still at the mercy of random chance.  Suffice it to say, I don’t plan on going for the “collect all frogs” achievement, and I think any completionists out there who do so will find it to be a huge pain in the ass.

Conservation efforts require resources, though, and that’s where the wetland management part of the game comes in.  The core gameplay is similar to the refuge, but instead of placing furniture, you’re placing ponds and plants.  Once placed, these have a few functions.  First of all, bugs will start to spawn, which can be collected for frog taming purposes later on.  Additionally, frogs will sometimes appear in the ponds, giving you more opportunities to see and tame new varieties.  Finally, plants will produce resources that can be turned into an assortment of products via short crafting minigames.  These products can then be sold off for money to fund more furniture purchases, or donated to a Wetlands Fanclub to earn reputation and – in theory – a significantly smaller monetary payout; unfortunately, the latter reward was bugged and didn’t occur during my playtime with the game.

There are a few problems with the wetlands gameplay, though.  Some of them are just weird design quirks.  For instance, Kamaeru evaluates your wetlands with a Bioscore, which takes into account both the carbon capture of the things you’ve placed as well as the diversity.  While the latter factor makes sense when placing plants (i.e. it’s better to have five each of three types of plants than fifteen of one type), for some reason it also counts ponds, which take up way more space.  This means that if you’re going for perfect balance – a must if you want a good bioscore – you’ll run out of room for ponds and still have tons of room for plants, leading to weird, incomplete-looking wetlands that are mostly just water with a few clusters of plants here and there to round out the diversity requirements.  Additionally, multiple small ponds can be combined into larger ponds, but only specific types in specific orientations, and the only way to figure them out is to experiment and then remember the correct combinations.  Also, achievements for digging 20 ponds and planting 60 crops only count individual digs and plants, so making combined ponds or planting multiple bushes at once (something you can unlock later on) only counts as one of those actions towards the achievements, despite increasing your in-game count of them by 2.  Lastly, it’s a bit annoying to manage the Wetlands Fanclub requests, as you have to travel to the refuge to see what they want, go back to the wetlands to craft it, and then hit up the refuge again to make the donation.

The bigger problem with the wetlands is that they shift the focus away from building up the refuge, which feels like it should be the main draw of the game.  Particularly early on, working on the wetland ends up feeling way more impactful, as it’s better to be raking in resources so you can earn money for furniture and have lots of bugs for frog taming.  Frogs can even spawn in the wetlands, so you’re even able to build up your collection of tamed frogs without monitoring the refuge.  The only time I really felt a need to return to the refuge was when the game set out an objective for me like “place X pieces of furniture” or “reach Y reputation level”.  In fact, as you progress through the game’s story, you unlock more locations that basically act as a wetland and refuge combined into one area, which makes me wonder why the game went for such a disjointed approach in its opening hours.  However, these new locations once again pull focus from the initial refuge location, and I feel like they do so before you get to make too much progress with your starting property.  By the time I wrapped up the story, all my refuges looked more like a few pieces of furniture arbitrarily thrown into a clearing, rather than thoughtfully constructed frog preserves, and while the post-game does allow you to freely play around and continue building things up as you see fit, those hoping for more concrete objectives to guide them in that endeavour will be disappointed.

There’s also the fact that the gameplay of the wetlands wears out its welcome pretty quickly.  The minigames for producing goods play out the same way each time, feeling more like a way to pad the gameplay than an interesting diversion.  And then there’s the waiting.  At the outset, I thought Kamaeru looked a bit like a mobile game, with big buttons and a mouse-centric control scheme that seemed tailor-made for touch screens.  However, it was only after getting into the game and realizing just how much of it involved timers that I really started to wonder if it was originally supposed to be a free-to-play mobile game with microtransactions to cut out the wait times.  Everything from producing resources to hiring bug-collecting helpers to getting new frogs to spawn in requires waiting around, and while the individual timers tend to be quite short, all that waiting adds up.  So much of my time spent playing Kamaeru involved staring blankly at the screen waiting for timers to finish, occasionally clicking on bugs to collect them or frogs to tame them.  I began hoping that progressing through the story would unlock ways to automate some of the tedium, but no such options appeared.  Ironically, all the timers also sort of detracted from the chill, laid-back atmosphere of the game, as I felt pressured to be constantly checking up on things to see if they had completed in order to effectively optimize my resource generation.

At least Kamaeru shines in its visual presentation.  The watercolour art style really adds to the game’s cozy, welcoming vibe, and I can’t emphasize enough how lovely it is to see all the different frogs interacting with the equipment in the reserve.  The bright colours of the frogs also stand out against the slightly muted tones of their environment, making it easy to pick them out when you’re trying to tame them or just want to see what they’re up to.  Also, while much of the story is told in a traditional visual novel style, employing simple character portraits and dialogue boxes, certain story moments are punctuated with special artwork that brings a bit more life into the world and characters than they otherwise would have had.

All that being said, I’m more than a bit mixed on Kamaeru.  It’s a great looking, accessible management game that’s let down by some focus issues and gameplay that veers away from chill into boring.  It’s tough to make a game that’s simple enough to get the player into a good flow state, but engaging enough to not become tedious, and it’s here where I think Kamaeru struggles.  I am a bit torn on my verdict, as I wonder if maybe I’m just expecting too much from a game that’s targeting a decidedly more casual audience.  It’s certainly a competently made game that charmed me enough to keep returning, even if it never held my attention for particularly long single play sessions.  However, it lacks a spark to make it truly stand out, and in the increasingly crowded market of cozy management sims, it may be worth looking elsewhere for your froggy fix.

6/10