1/6/2022
Review of Wobble Frog Adventures
Developed by: Walaber Entertainment
2018, iOS
Wobble Frog Adventures is a physics game, in line with other physics games like QWOP (7.5), where you try to manage the movement of an unwieldy character. In Wobble Frog Adventures, you control a toy frog with two on-screen sliders, one to open and close its leg joint and one for its jaw. You learn how the controls work mainly through intuition, and until then you'll spend as much time accidentally moving backward as forward. There's an annoying feeling of working against the physics of the game when you're just trying to do something simple, kind of the same feeling as running uphill in Sonic the Hedgehog (7.5), but the controls allow you to find a particular groove in operating the character eventually, and it's all the more rewarding because you found your own, inexplicable way there.
There are two modes in Wobble Frog Adventures: Adventure and Speedrun. Adventure has randomized levels, really set segments that get rearranged, which actually become repetitive once you know how to solve each part. Speedrun takes a random level and lets you race against other players' online ghosts, which doesn't feel repetitive. Because your frog has so many different maneuvers to get through a level, and because the physics will work out a little bit differently each time, you can come up with many new ways to optimize your path through each speedrun. The angle of the frog's head when you jump, or how quickly you extend its leg, will change its trajectory. And there are unusual techniques you can learn such as extending both its head and leg at the same time to do a long jump, or wiggling its leg to run across a flat surface. Each speedrun feels like a puzzle when you combine the randomized levels with the different movement options you have. And the unpredictability of the physics makes it so you can never exactly "solve" it.
What I would like (and something like this but better probably already exists) is a multiplayer, speedrun-racing game that works in a similar way. Vehicle-racing games are already like multiplayer speedrunning, I guess, but there's one correct path through each level. In a speedrun-racing game there would be different ways a player could choose to get through a level, and if like in Wobble Frog Adventures the movement and techniques were varied enough, there wouldn't always be an obvious, correct path. If the levels were randomized as you played them, you would have to quickly make decisions about the best path based on the same limited information that the other players have. It would be something like a competitive, improvisational speedrun.