Probably one of the better 3D Sonic games, full of neat ideas and with a control scheme that feels more finely-tuned than most 3D Sonics, BUT it's also a horrendous, occasionally unplayable mess, physics and level design opposing any attempt at fun the whole way.

Early segments had me appreciating this, warts and all, lamenting the lack of a sequel to polish this stuff into something genuinely great, but by the last two world I just wanted the game to disappear forever. It outstayed its welcome and then some, simply because of polish that wasn't there.

Also the cutscenes were unwatchable for me. Skipped every one that I could, and felt happier for it.

Still, a fun exercise in what could have been.

I’d been excited to get to this as soon as it was announced, so naturally it’s taken me three years to actually sit down and play it (on Steam Deck, over one day, while sick). Detective Grimoire was a rough around the edges and occasionally clumsily handled point & click, but with a fantastic protagonist, a charming sense of humour, and that genius puzzle solving mechanic of constructing sentences using clues and prompts. A bit more polish and it’d be a real five star affair.

And so here we are. The art style is immaculate, nice thick lines, bouncy animations, and a palette that often brings to mind swizzels love hearts (or parma violets for the gothier characters). The puzzles are simple, but still require you to actually turn your brain on and engage just enough to solve them, which combined with gentle prompts on incorrect submissions means you’re never really stuck. The characters are all layered and interesting, and you can learn so much about them by doing additional dialogue through your inventory or profiles. That dialogue, as well! Fully voice-acted, wonderfully performed, every character feels all the more real for the quality performances on display here.

The story itself is a good complicated murder mystery/family affair, and I tried to sell it to a friend as being akin to Knives Out, which is both uncharitable to both and still true enough to count. The only stumbling block is the ending, which is… fine. It’s fine. It’s not clean enough, not nearly definitive enough, without any sign of a sequel on the horizon.

Oh, they have said they’re working on a follow-up? Oh, never mind then. Five stars it is. A most excellent adventure.

It always feels weird reviewing a fighting game because it's entirely up to the player what counts as 'finishing', what counts as a complete enough experience to review, and what stones can be left unturned.

I have put in the time, finished the extensive turorials, built up a nice win/loss record, finished arcade mode, and done a bunch of fishing. I have not played story mode, or played as a single character other than I-No outside of the tutorials.

So... not a complete experience. But what I got to enjoy instead was a fantastic guitar witch simulator, with chunky hits and simplified mechanics that make for the best I-No experience I've ever had. An absolute joy, and a wonderful way of getting all up in gender feelings because who doesn't wish they could become a beautiful witch with an angry hat.

Highly recommended if you have femme-oriented dysphoria, enjoy chunky feeling fighters, or hated how it was a half-circle input to stroke in Xrd.

Gorgeous, delivers on its concept, is fun and very replayab-

TIME’S UP!
[PRESS X TO CONTINUE]

You don’t realise how short 60 seconds really is until late-

TIME’S UP!
[PRESS X TO CONTINUE]

Apparently you can finish this in less than 25 loops, but I-

TIME’S UP!
[PRESS X TO CONTINUE]

Look, it’s just a really good game, right. Recommended to a-

TIME’S UP!
[PRESS X TO CONTINUE]

There’s something here. A glimmer of something truly excellent, held back by a couple of key issues.
First, the card game. The idea is sound, creating a sex scene across different positions and actions in a three act structure, all done using a deck of cards, a randomised element that means you may not have the act needed to achieve the given objective of any shag. But all failure means is a lack of progress in the main story, and any starlets you’ve levelled up will still have their stories continue regardless, at least if you have a backlog to get through. It’s unexciting, and a limited pool of cards (including the starlets themselves and special event cards that adjust stats or redraw hands) and an even more limited pool of objectives means that repetition sets in QUICK. But given expansion, more risk and reward (a management sim aspect perhaps? Something to make success more crucial), and some smarter missions (how about a no-penetration challenge? A ‘keep it internal’ challenge?), this could work out great.

Secondly, the starlets themselves. They’re all decent horror designs, but hold too much back. You have an opportunity with a game like this to indulge deeply in fetish, and sadly it is ALWAYS restrained to the point that there’s not much difference between the cast beyond the occasional bit of translucence or an extra limb.

You need to go all out. Lucy is a muscle-bound oni, but her body type is lacking in mass. Make her swole as hell and lean into it. Like full bodybuilder. Redd is a slobbish werewolf, lean into that body hair, baybee! Blibby is the curvy slime character, hungry for food and sex, give her more than the tiniest of tummy bumps, maybe even get that vore gig going. Someone’ll be into it! Susie Stitches is an undead girl built for sex, made of various people’s body parts, play with the customisation. Heck, go dark, that means she can take it rough! Hips ground to dust by a mega-shag would be easily replaced, so go heavy!

Instead they’re all just… fine. Sexy, cute characters. They’ll do the job for the average gamer, but they could have been so much more. They could have been perfectly perverse.

Also it just doesn’t have an ending. It just… keeps going after you’ve seen all the scenes. Gimme closure. Gimme a climax!

A final frustration: why are all the sex acts so straight(see note) when every male character is not a part of your deck? If you’re gonna only have the female starlets accessible, have at least SOME of the cards reflect this, rather than the penis-sprouting approach the game currently takes. The boys are well-designed enough, and in the visual novel sections we get to see the, in action, as well as the girls dealing with each other as needs be. But the game itself is so penis-to-vagina oriented that it kind of blows.

I’m talking myself out of the good time I’ve had, but it really is cute. Which’ll do. But I want more, and I want it bigger and better.

*(note: for purposes of this review I’m being a bit basic about gender here, but it’s clear from the designs that this is reflective of the game itself as much as me being so simple on genitals.)

Wait, have I never rated this?
It has baseball! And pretty good baseball at that.
It has tennis! Kinda mediocre but still fun tennis, anyway.
It has boxing! Which is uh. I dunno. Maybe I'm bad at it.
But more than anything it has bowling, in a most excellent form that never stops being fun.
Wii Sports good.

I love a good picross game. This is almost that.

A touch too easy, and with an obnoxious timer on the boss puzzles that meant I had finished every single other puzzle with a HUGE amount of those left over. A completely needless feature, as the post-game catalogue (including some bonus puzzles) removes the timer entirely. A very Konami move, and I’m shocked you can’t pay your way past it. Not that I’d want to, it’s just… Konami, y’know?

An excellent argument for turning off your wifi once in a while, too, as the many adverts for other Konami games only actually attempt to appear of you’re connected, and their very presence isn’t just obnoxious, but actually impacts performance.

Like all good trilogies, this ends with the third one.

Everything is nicely connected, characters return, TWISTS HAPPEN, jobs change, bad rooms are entered, hats are stolen and/or worn, poems are written, and a scooter is rode. My God, is a scooter ever rode.

I don’t know how you could ever make a longer experience out of these games, and I don’t care to imagine, but it does seem a crime that our time with Frog Detective ends here.

crime is, of course, not real, and I should not have made up this crime. I am sorry.