Making a point in the worst way possible

It's easy to criticize anything and everything, Tender Frog House takes this idea and keeps hammering the nail past the wooden plank, past the floor and past the actual earth itself to the point you actually lose touch what the whole thing was to begin with.

At first, bringing criticisms to the "twee" or the "comfy" genre of games felt like the one thing the creator of the game had going for it in terms of their own ideas until they kept constantly quoting other people and losing the point later on. It just feels like a lot is being said but nothing from the heart or substantial is coming out. I will say you should always have the freedom to speak your mind and have your own opinions on things because that's how passionate discussion about the medium we all love as video games comes to be but it doesn't feel like I learned anything at all with the thirty minutes I spent on this title. All of this while satirizing the games you're criticizing as hell spawn. I got no personal vendetta against the main point since I'm not a fan of the genre being criticized but you need to stand on your own two feet and not rely on quotes that make it feel an AI wrote the whole script for your games because that's how it feels. Soulless and wasting data. I will say I don't inherently completely disagree with some of the points being made but you can put some effort until making those points that isn't just extremely floaty text that makes it hard to read like come on dude, you can't just put the whole fucking paragraph there of what Adorno said and expect me to read it especially when it's cut off like that.

This is also accompanied by a quickly grating midi piano piece and even from a technical side, the game crashed twice with the web version and the downloaded version with having no option but to skip dialogue to get to where I was again. I get having a save feature or some safety net is moot on a game like this but when all there is to the game is clicking a text box, something has got to give.

I'm usually not this negative when it comes to games and especially when it's a single person project, video games are hard to make. It just feels like this game wants to make a point in the most obnoxious and condescending way possible with quotes from people I haven't even heard of until today. It doesn't even narrow in on anything and just veers off the deep end and can easily lose anyone trying to understand what the game is trying to say. Only a deep curiosity will get you to play this game or someone wanting you to experience this "game" and I'd probably just avoid this and play something else. You can either play this or a game of Dota 2 and I hate to say this but I'm preferring the latter.

Reviewed on Jan 08, 2023


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