Frogun Encore

My first thought booting up Frogun Encore was that someone spent real, personal time on this. Molegato is a one-person Spanish studio, and that handcraft reads in every chunky polygon and radiant colour palette. This is a bite-sized PS1/N64-flavored 3D platformer where Renata uses a frog-shaped grapple gun to swing, snatch enemies, and slingshot across gaps, and it earns its retro clothes rather than just wearing them as costume. The core toolset has been genuinely expanded from the 2022 original. Renata now has a double jump, a sling catapult that fires her forward off a grapple point, a toss jump that lets her spike captured enemies or jars downward for extra height, and ziplines woven throughout the 21 stages. All of it is unlocked from the start, so you spend the whole game getting better at combining these moves rather than waiting for a tutorial drip-feed. Stage design rewards that mastery: each level is tight and typically finishable in under ten minutes, and hidden shortcuts open up once you internalize the grapple timing. Bosses stay on the approachable side, testing pattern recognition without the kind of spike that sends controllers flying. The couch co-op is the headline addition and it mostly delivers. A second player drops in as Jake (armed with his own Snakegun) at any point, the camera pulls back to a zoomed-out view so neither player gets left behind, and if one of you dies you respawn in a floating bubble that drifts back to your partner. It is obviously designed around a solo run first, but hunting coins with a friend alongside you is genuinely pleasant, even if the bubble rescue occasionally struggles to keep pace. Note that two controllers are required for co-op on PC, which is easy to miss before purchase. Where the game earns its caveats: the fixed camera is a real tradeoff. Veterans of the first Frogun who relied on manual camera control to judge depth and height will miss it, and a small but vocal portion of players feel the loss acutely. On the other side, Nintendo Life's review noted the new top-down perspective removes a lot of previous frustration by keeping the stage layout clearly visible. That divide is real, and your preference for fixed-vs-free camera will shape how much the occasional missed jump stings. The tongue-grapple auto-aim can also snap to nearby enemies when you want a wall, which throws off precision runs. Completionists who chase deathless clears and speed medals may find these friction points add up, but casual players coasting through on the generous checkpoint system and unlimited lives will barely notice. Soundtrack is upbeat and purposeful in the way only small productions tend to get right, sitting just beneath the action rather than shouting over it. Performance is exemplary across the board, running at a locked 60fps even on older hardware. It is a short game, closer to five to seven hours for a full clear, and it knows it. That self-awareness is part of its charm.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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