When it comes to games as a medium for comedy, it can be a bit tough to find good examples of pure ‘comedy’ experiences that are any good. Sure, visiting the ‘meme’ tag on Steam might have you thinking that ‘joke’ games are common, but often that particular tag is so far removed from comedy that it ends up feeling more like tragedy. Luckily, our Frog Legs review should offer a glimmer of hope as we look at a genuine comedy/horror experience with meme-y references and meta humour without it being a total waste of your time.
What Is Frog Legs?
If you’re not already familiar, then you’re missing out. Frogs Legs is a comedy-horror FPS title that sees you take control of a bunch of neon-coloured 8-bit-era frogs trying to cross a road. When something goes horribly wrong, you escape with your life and find yourself in a new and three-dimensional world. Before long, your past comes back to haunt you, and with a game that isn’t shy of saying flat out “We are a horror game”, things go about as well as you can expect.
While it very much starts out looking like a clone of Frogger, by design as well, I would imagine, the visuals and gameplay styles are pretty varied. By the end of the game, you’ll have done your classic Frogger thing, but you’ll also have gone ‘Doom’ and explored an almost empty house with the lights turned off in the style of 1,000 different itch.io horror experiences. There’s also a classic story of betrayal and forgiveness, but much like everything else going on here, it’s done with tongue firmly lodged in cheek country.
Alas, Poor Greg (or Whatever That One Frog’s Name Was)
It’s worth noting that this game is incredibly short. While your first time through will probably run you around 30-40 minutes, it’s possible to blitz through the game on subsequent playthroughs in a matter of minutes if you’re skipping dialogue and solving puzzles immediately. I also think it’s important that the game makes it explicitly clear that not only is this a relatively short game, but that it also isn’t really an FPS. There’s some FPS gameplay, for sure, but it’s mostly pretty shallow and serves more as a means to make jokes/references rather than as an example of deep or interesting FPS gameplay.
No, most of what you’re getting in Frog Legs are jokes and references around genre tropes and video games in general. When you wake up next to your frog-wife in bed, she says, “The lights have gone out, but luckily, this is a horror game, so there’s a circuit-breaker in the basement”. Clearly, the game is very self-aware, so almost nothing that happens is a big shock. I think what makes Frog Legs work is that it keeps a tight pace, makes a few killer jokes, and is honest and up-front about what it is: a very silly game that you’re supposed to play through, laugh at, then share with your friends, and it pulls that off with aplomb.
Gameplay, Graphics & Sound
It probably doesn’t need to be overstated that there’s nothing visually all that exciting going on here, at least not during the bulk of the gameplay. Obviously, there’s not a high level of graphical fidelity, but at the very least, it doesn’t feel like this was an asset flip or AI-assisted in any way. The visuals are all consistent, and the ending animated screen looks great, but beyond that, you’re getting what you should probably expect from a short horror game made in a modern gaming engine.
Sound design is also pretty neat. It’s filled with sounds that fit right at home with the ‘Doom’ style of gameplay during those segments and classic ‘horror’ noises during the house sequence. I suppose the biggest complaint I could make is that with a game this short, none of the sounds or music really had time to cement themselves in my head. Finally, the gameplay is, as we’ve discussed above, a triplet between Frogger, OG Doom, and itch.io horror, but if you’re looking for replay value, there’s a bunch of golden flies hidden around the levels for you to collect on subsequent playthroughs, and it does make a great game for hoovering up achievements on Steam too.
The Verdict
At the end of the day, Frog Legs is a fun experience, and it manages to be a genuine comedy game without needing to rely completely on memes and internet culture to produce some chuckles. Don’t get me wrong, at times it feels like an idea come up with by a 12-year-old, but then again, so does everything Hideo Kojima does, and he can’t move for awards and prestige. The real sign of a game like this made with love rather than for meme-y clout is the fact that it is 100% up-front about what it is supposed to be. No obfuscation of gameplay length or what you actually do in the game, and that alone makes it worth checking out, in my books.
Developer: Elliott Dahle
Publisher: Elliott Dahle
Platform: PC
Release Date: 19th May 2025
