Overall, I found Frog Fractions to be a wonderful parody of traditional games. I enjoyed how subversive it was, once I understood that the confusion was part of the game creators’ intentions and had a deeper meaning. I will admit, though, I found it completely perplexing at first go. At best, I found Frog Fractions absurdly entertaining. At worst, I found its inclarity extremely frustrating, and that is what made me rage-quit at the end of the game. The accompanying paper served as a beautiful accompaniment to the game and made the overall experience that much more engaging (I love things that have hidden “meanings” and “stories” behind them!)
Now, for a more detailed play-by-play of how the game went for me, view the below. I hope my detailed description of my user behavior is insightful to anyone who is interested in how people perceive Frog Fractions and what a gameplay could look like from a new user’s perspective.
In the first “Wave”:
I was confused on why there was no tutorial for the game — I felt I must have missed it and even restarted the game to see if there was a tutorial during the onboarding. However, there was none, and with no guidance I kept failing.
When I failed the first two times I realized I must be doing something wrong, which encouraged me to try new techniques which I didn’t know if it would work but felt intuitive enough. In the end I discovered that I could increase the range of my tongue if I did a long-press, which is the realization that got me through the game. Its a really easy game once you discover this so having this initial friction of not knowing my true capability actually hooked me a lot as a player when I discovered this “secret” mechanism which helped me smoothly complete the first wave.
Words section
In the tutorial for the words section again there were no explicit trainings, and this was when I started to understand that oh, this game wants you to figure out its mechanics with your intuition. This sort of intuition-based discovery would only be possible with a game that is very intuitively designed in the first place, so I gotta give frog fractions that!
Sidenote: This seemed like a tutorial but this wasn’t a keyboard and I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it’s what got me clicking on the keys on my board ??
Overall it seemed like a game that was fairly easy to play once you knew how — the most satisfying part was figuring out how to play it in the first place. And they add new mechanics at each wave! So new things to discover and figure out at every step!
Balls hitting – indignity meter
It was hard for me to figure out why I failed because the Indignity meter wasn’t giving adequate signal that it was being affected when the balls would hit the player. It was only after a few tries that I realised that hits affect my Indignity meter and a full meter would mean my death. Then I tried avoiding the balls because I finally knew their significance. At this point, honestly, the lack of clear instruction started getting to me. Because even the mechancis themselves were getting harder, and figuring them out was still an issue.
Final moments…
And what are zorkmids? I see I have 2. I think back to what I have gotten 2 of. It must be the presents I collected underwater?
I need 2,000 of those to unlock the next upgrade, so Im at bit of a standstill until then, I realise. No matter how hard I try I can’t really figure out what is a zorkmid?! and then I rage quit.
FINALLY ENDED PLAYING HERE:
Thanks for following in this play-by-play. I hope you found it interesting! <3
