Of all the recent gaming trends, the one that got me was the bullet heaven genre (or horde shooters, or survivor-likes), popularized by the crazy and deserved success of Vampire Survivors. Featuring a reverse bullet hell concept, where your character is the source of all the bullets, in timed runs with random builds, it's really fun when you understand the mechanics behind it. Since then, I'm looking for new iterations of this idea made by other teams, in different levels of success.

The last one I played was Froguelike, a two-people work launched in early access by the Swedish gaming incubator Spelkollektivet. Instead of monsters, weapons and fantasy scenarios, you are a frog, doing froggy things, like extending your tongue and eating a lot of bugs. And when I say "a lot of bugs", I'm being serious: following the bullet heaven idea, giant hordes of mosquitos, flies and butterflies are ready to take you down if you aren't hungry enough.

Before talking about how is the gameplay, can I just say how happy I am to see a different theme in the genre? Yes, killing skeletons is fun, but I think that because of Vampire Survivors, a lot of the games inspired by them got to a similar fantasy (or sci-fi) setting. I love the concept that you are not really just "destroying enemies", but eating them, as a frog should do. I'm always down for strange themes to recontextualize mechanics that I already like.

It's hard (and not that fair) to talk about a indie game this way, but Froguelike follows the "bullet heaven" checklist so well that I would understand if people tag it "derivative" sometimes. Besides the curious theme, you choose a frog (that has its own status and initial tongue), go to the map, (def)eat enemies, get experience, level up, upgrade your tongue(s) and passive abilities, and keep going until the end of the run. With the gold you get, you can improve your base status to the next runs. Even some abilities names are familiar.

The biggest difference of this new iteration (besides the frogs) is how runs are broken into random chapters, like a more simple "choose your own adventure" book. Instead of choosing a different map, you choose a chapter and starts a 5-minute run to survive. In the end, your health is replenished and you can choose another one to keep the run alive. Each chapter has different enemies, pickups and ponds in the map, but I honestly expected more changes to differentiate them.

I can be a reviewer, but first, I'm also a player, so I need to talk about something: there's more content in Froguelike that I haven't played, but I didn't think it was worth it to search for it. One of the most impactful things in bullet heaven for me is that feeling of always surpass what you believed was "powerful". You start with one weapon, and then you have a lot of them, and you feel powerful. But some runs later, you tested more builds and made some upgrades, and you are EVEN STRONGER! This always consistent crescendo of awesomeness is the core of having fun with those games.

I didn't felt more powerful in Froguelike, not even after 10 or 15 runs. I didn't have a lot of options to test and find synergies, the upgrades are really simple and didn't changed a lot and the gold ratio by run is way more scarce than what I was expecting. I know there's more content in the game (the achievement list always remember me of that), but I, sincerely, couldn't find energy inside me to keep playing those repetitive levels to try to find them.

When you buy in an early access game, you invest in a promise with potential. To me, Froguelike has a lot of potential! The frog theme is welcome in a group of similar fantasy games, and the chapter structure can be really interesting, specially if they start to use it to tell different stories depending on what you choose. But, for now, I can only recommend it if you are a fan of the genre (of a frog fan in general). I hope to get back to this lake in the future and being hyped to eat bugs again.