Time on Frog Island (PS5)
Time on Frog Island presents itself as a cozy game about exploring an island full of friendly frog people, and despite it kicking off with the main character finding themselves there due to a shipwreck, it is a game free of any combat so initially it seems like a promising low pressure experience. However, as you begin to explore the island, your ship captain starts to feel more like a glorified delivery worker, there being very little substance to the actions you can take and little to make the interactions with the locals actually interesting.
The main goal of Time on Frog Island is to rebuild your damaged vessel but it is not the only work you’re meant to focus on. In order to get the right materials to patch up your tiny dinghy and depart you will have to speak with the locals, but there is no actual speech in this adventure nor is there even text outside of menus. Instead, little speech bubbles will appear beside characters to show how they’re feeling and to mention objects of interest, most people on the island having some item they want you to find and bring to them. While you will encounter characters like a frog artist, some churchgoers, a slightly sketchy looking merchant, and a cartographer, the fact they can’t really speak means their personality only really comes across in their design and expression. Unfortunately, while they are often cute and soft in appearance, the frog people don’t convey much in the way of personalities besides a few less happy looking folks. There is some effective wordless storytelling when you go to sleep at the end of an in-game day, the backstory of the ship captain told through sepia-tone pieces of art that knows how to convey emotion and character through expression and action, but the frogs that are the backbone of Time on Frog Island mostly just perform basic daily tasks and hardly feel like characters because their primary purpose is to give you work.
The island you’ll be exploring isn’t too enormous but feels a fair bit bigger because of a few elements. Your playable character has a pretty slow run and some stretches of the island are wooded areas or otherwise fairly plain. You can only carry one item at a time overhead as well, meaning every delivery must be completed on its own rather than there being any form of multitasking. The tasks you’ll be sent on can be completed on your own time but there’s only so much to do at any one time, so you will criss-cross the island a fair bit and find it lacking in things to appreciate. The frog village and some houses scattered around the island can have nifty designs, the farmer frog having a roof styled like a large leaf that pools water and dribbles it out into a barrel, but there’s no breathtaking sights and since things like fruit and flowers are often part of the many trades you’ll be performing, their presence is limited and the world is less visually appealing for it. Even when you come across some ruins, there’s not much to think about as they feel like they have been placed about without much consideration for constructing a true history of the island. They break up the environment a little at least, but there’s not much to glean from them since they are so simple and unable to convey much within the game’s simple systems. You might at least find an occasional discovery that perks you up like a bird roost, but even this mostly just means that you can now grab eggs for the people who want them rather than providing something truly novel.
As mentioned, most of your work in Time on Frog Island is going to be about finding the right item for the right person. Some of these are laying out in the open, others involve a sequence of trades, and a few are time dependent. Oftentimes after helping a frog they’ll request you come back another day, and some tasks like a carpenter frog building a bridge take multiple days, meaning there are times you can find yourself with little to do of importance and not really anything to distract yourself from that fact. There are tadpoles that chase after you like dogs that can you pick up and throw, you can eventually put bait in a fishing trap and wait for the haul the next day, or you can do other tasks that are basically chores like planting the bouncy mushrooms around the island for an achievement/trophy. One of the few tasks of mention that involves some quick movement and thought are a few races around the island, although having a chance at two of them involve brewing the right stuff at the tavern and the tavern keeper has more requests than anyone so it can take some time until those are possible. While it can be nice to set up an adventuring schedule of sorts when you have multiple “wait until tomorrow” situations to see to after a sleep, days aren’t that short either and tasks won’t expire if you take too long getting to them.
There are thankfully a few tiny puzzles that turn the gameplay away from just looking around a large and fairly empty island for items. Not many of these are really that deep or involve much thought, often it’s just realizing that an item you found can be used somewhere without a frog directly telling you to do so. At least figuring out how to utilize a set of maggots that burrow when you get close feels like a proper puzzle since it leaves clues and figuring it out isn’t as straightforward as some other interactions. It can almost be said to be a puzzle when a frog’s speech bubbles aren’t direct in their request, most items that are mentioned being the exact delivery required while some are more vague and confusing just because you might not realize the item is meant to be emblematic. The straightforwardness of much of the game is where it comes up short, since it’s more about just coming across a necessary item rather than doing anything special to acquire it. There are some skills you can eventually acquire like a slightly better jump and even a tongue whip that can help ever so slightly speed up island traversal, but the map-free exploration only offers one way to cover ground quickly with a teleportation artifact. This artifact is meant to only take you from one specific region to another and attempts to move it to make your own shortcuts will just cause them to return to those spots, but there is at least one trick you can use if you want to go back to base camp or have an item reappear where it was first found. Enter deep water and you will go back to your wrecked ship while any items you had on hand return to their origin point, and since the game mostly remembers where every object was last placed, this can be a nice if unusual option if you realized you took it somewhere it has no reason to be.
Whether you’re focused solely on rebuilding your boat or you want to help everyone on the island regardless of whether they factor into that main objective, Time on Frog Island is a pretty short game to complete. A lot of that time will be spent in transit and there aren’t really any nifty or cute diversions to fill up time, even the achievements trending towards completing certain trade routes or performing basic actions like jumping enough times. The lack of much challenge does mean at least it’s more a matter of doing dull chores rather than rubbing up against flawed mechanics, but unless you just want something to do with your hands, it doesn’t feel like the game is offering too much in the way of interesting discoveries or fun interactions. You’ll just see the same frogs and places as you tote around goods, the payoff for your efforts almost never anything novel.
THE VERDICT: Besides visual appeal, Time on Frog Island feels surprisingly lacking in most departments while trying to pass off its bland delivery work as a cozy adventure. It’s hardly rewarding to interact with the shallow frog people who just ask you to grab items from around the island and doing the deliveries are slow and fairly thankless. A few puzzles briefly make you think a bit and the ship captain’s backstory is at least communicated effectively, but time on the island tends to drag as there’s little of interest to do and making progress often just means more item toting tasks are available.
And so, I give Time on Frog Island for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. Mindless work can be a bit relaxing, yes, but it feels like if this game didn’t pitch itself as a relaxing experience, fewer people would give its vapid work much slack. The empty delivery tasks common in Time on Frog Island’s activities are routinely chastised in other titles, but there are ways that could have made this simple gameplay style work. The fact the frogs only speak with representative images really holds them back from being a potential cornerstone of interesting content, since if they had true personalities and quirks then you would want to deliver goods to them just to hear what they had to say. If there were stronger rewards to work towards then you could prioritize and feel satisfaction in completing your goals, options for traveling the island faster or carrying more than one item at a time obvious perks that players would be happy to pursue. If the island had some scenic vistas, interesting objects to play with, or much of anything that wasn’t either an item for delivery or an object with a single feature than maybe you might stop and smell the roses from time to time as there would be something worthy of attention. It really is surprisingly how many simple ideas the game missed on how it could have made this short adventure feel more worthwhile, but beyond its cute character design and a nicely colored and lit world, Time on Frog Island’s best feature ends up being that it’s not too long. The trades may be quite dull to complete, but at least there aren’t so many it becomes grueling to do all the legwork necessary to see this to the finish, and at least the only bit of good story-telling gives you something to look forward to when you sleep for the night.
If you want a game about relaxing work, you can check out PowerWash Simulator. If you want low pressure but rewarding tasks, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you want some interesting stories to supplement work that almost feels like a chore, Waku Waku Sweets has you covered. Pretty much, unless you really like frogs, many games with the same general tone and genre as Time on Frog Island have a leg up over it. If you do play it at least it won’t be too rough to get through it, but there are much better ways to relax and unwind than doing this game’s version of menial chores.