Review/Guide: Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge – A beautiful game, but did we enjoy it?

Looking at the art style for Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, it’s really no wonder why we wanted to get our little grippy-grabbers on it. Visually, it looks straight out of a storybook and you get to collect incredibly cute frogs.

That’s all you need in life to be happy, right? Well, you might need just a bit more. There’s nothing straightforward in this game. It’s pretty heavy on the tutorial mode and even 2.5 hours into gameplay, it’s still prompting things to learn.

So, is that a good thing or a bad thing, and why is it a bit of both? I think the fact that the title of this article being called both a “review” and a “guide” says it all. 

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge

Let’s just get the story element out of the way first because we’re going to be talking about a lot of technical mechanics in this game.

You play as a girl named Cleo who has returned to the wetlands that you used to play on as a child. Here, you meet up with your childhood friend, Axel, who wants your help in building a frog sanctuary and restoring the wetlands back to their former glory.

That’s pretty much it for background details. As you play, you’ll meet more characters, but they don’t add to the story so much as they introduce new elements into gameplay.

It’s visually charming and I don’t even have complaints about the sound. But, there’s just so much to juggle. So, let’s try and explain it as concisely as I possibly can. I’m going to be breaking this down into sections.

Frogs and Insects

Your job is simple in the beginning. You place down a few items, wait for the frogs to spawn, and then you take their picture or feed them to log them into your Frogedex. There are several different varieties of frogs and they have multiple patterns and color combinations.

Frogs show up in a few ways. If they are new, they will have lines around them to let you know you’ve never seen them before. When you tame a frog, it will have hearts above it to show that you’ve tamed it. 

When a frog shows up, but has no hearts or lines, it’s because you’ve taken a picture and cataloged it, but you haven’t tamed it yet. 

Frogs require four insects that are specific to the breed in order to tame them. Once they’re tamed, you can use them in breeding. I’ll go into more about breeding in a different section.

The frogs take a few different food combinations; the easiest just want four flies, but some want worms/beetles exclusively or in addition to those flies. To get bugs initially, you’ll have to restore the wetlands where they populate.

There are only four types of insects: Flies, Caterpillars, Diving Beetles, and Dragonflies. In the beginning, you’re the only one that can gather insects. But, later on, you’ll have the ability to have helpers which I go over in the character section.

Apparently, insects can be placed on furniture to encourage certain types of frogs to spawn. However, I didn’t notice a difference when I did it. So, I’d suggest saving your insects for taming.

Characters

Axel: He’s not just the childhood best friend and the reason for the game. He, also, runs a little wagon-style shop where you get your initial furniture from. Not everything is unlocked from the beginning, however. You’ll have more options open up as you level up.

Anabelle: On the refuge, there’s a lab where a retired surgeon devotes her time to researching the frogs and the wetlands. She lets you know that there are some frog species that are endangered and she will need your help to sequence their genes for further study and breeding processes. You can only breed frogs that you have tamed, so taming frogs comes back full circle here. 

She opens up breeding options, but I have a whole section on that, so I won’t go into it here.

Anita: You won’t see a lot from her in early gameplay, but I’m sure she comes up more often later. She is the Mayor, but she seems less than enthused about the goings on in the refuge. So, convincing her of the project’s worthiness is likely going to be goal-based.

Djena:  She is an energetic carpenter who will allow you to build new pieces of furniture, fix things, and paint. She opens up the option to buy more blueprints for more cosmetic items. There are some items that have a color wheel on them and that indicates that she can adjust the color for you which you do for a small price. You basically adjust the colors manually by sliding between red, green, and blue paints for the shade you want. 

Dylan: He bought land nearby for his farm and is interested in collaborating with the wetlands project. Opening up Dylan not only opens up questlines to improve your wetlands, but you can, also, use him to catch bugs. This is invaluable, especially since the first time I used him, I was able to assign him to catch five caterpillars.

For 5 coins, you can assign him to catch either 5 flies or 5 caterpillars and it takes less than a minute to deliver.

Jon: He owns a small construction company nearby and offers his help in restoring the old mill in the wetlands. Because you grow reeds and other fibers, he offers to turn it into a paper mill. Also, he’s your second helper who can help you with catching insects.

Jon lets you decide between catching 5 diving beetles or 5 dragonflies at a time and charges 10 coins for it. He catches them just as quickly, so they’re fairly invaluable as helpers.

If there are other characters that open up later, I haven’t gotten that far.

Wetlands and Operations

Here’s where things kind of get… larger to understand than is technically cozy. There are some sciency-sounding things like your wetlands having a bioscore. Obviously, the higher the bioscore, the better. It’s the combined value of carbon capture and flora diversity.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, it’s a lot of fancy terms for, “keep things even”. 

The game will prompt you as a challenge to get a 15% bioscore and you complete that by placing vegetation and ponds in the wetlands in a balanced way. If you go to the shack, there is an info tab that will give you wetland information and it will break down the vegetation stats to let you know when things are in harmony. 

In this same shack, you can buy blueprints to develop more wetlands restoration technology. 

Not only does planting fauna help the wetlands, but when you plant berry bushes (among other items), you can take those to the onsite kitchen in the wetlands and make jam out of them. Selling the jams will fund the refuge. There are a few things you can make and a few ways to make items.

Not only does the kitchen make food-related items, but you’ll open up the previously mentioned old Mill that Jon turns into a paper mill that uses the fibers you grow. But, there’s also a small blueprint you can buy for the weeds that grow in the wetlands called nettles that you can grind up to create a powder you can sell.

Later on, Dylan will prompt you to buy some beehives, so you’ll be able to have honey going as well. There’s a lot of moving parts here to juggle and to make money from.

You’re probably going to spend a lot of time in the wetlands, honestly. Not only is it a free way to get bugs, but frogs show up at the ponds. So, you can take pictures for your Frogedex at the very least, even if you don’t have the insects available to tame them. 

As you might imagine, some frogs only show up during certain conditions that rely on your carbon capture rate and biodiversity score; these are generated by your activities in the wetlands and directly affect frog biodiversity. 

Later, you can merge things together like ponds to create megaponds. This not only helps to up the carbon capture, but it attracts certain insects. Specific configurations attract different insects, so you have to be particular in your configuration. 

One last note about the kitchen and mill; these areas have the tiniest of mini-games. You basically have to drag the ingredients where they get merged, move some things around, and then hit a button to start the process. The only reason this is worth mentioning is because if you click during the making process, you may be able to grab extra items.

Breeding

As I said, there seems to be a basis of actual science here because each frog comes with their own unique makeup. They have their own shape and gene colors. So, for instance, with the Victulus Blush Banana frog; the genus is Victulus and controls the shape, but Blush Banana are two colors on the frog.

If you were to breed this frog with a different Victulus frog that’s two different colors, you’re basically assured a Victulus – but not always – and the colors will be up to some internal algorithm of chance. 

When breeding, a small mini-game of tic-tac-toe appears to be the way things are decided. Your playing pieces are the individual information. So, Victulus, Banana, and Blush are all pieces you’re playing out on a 3 x 3 grid. You pop in Banana and then the computer will play its own piece where it wants. If you can align 3 of the same genes in a row — vertical, horizontal, or diagonal — then that guarantees you’ll have that feature in the offspring.

But, even the game says that you don’t have full control of how frog offspring will emerge. It says that nature will select its own genes from the parent frogs. So, it’s randomized and will be created based on the information you feed it.

There are some background elements that go into it that may be based on color theory because I had two frogs that had pink, aqua, and kiwi green, but when the randomizer popped up, I saw a color option for lavender. So, there may be some overlapping ideas of color theory or the algorithm just pops all the additional colors into the randomizer at a lower chance of success.

If you make a brand new frog, be sure that you feed it because it won’t be tamed otherwise. If you create a frog you already have… well, congrats. You get nothing. You don’t even get a second frog of that type to sell, it just poofs into the void as far as I can tell.

Later. there’s a section where you can eventually breed rarer colors, but because it’s all pure chance, it can be frustrating if you’re relying on that for your missing frogs. I was extremely unimpressed with it, honestly. It was tedious and just… aggravating.

Everything Else

So, we’ve gone over characters, wetlands, operations, frogs, insects, and breeding… what’s left? Mostly, it’s just the interface, leveling up, and my thoughts. 

At the side of your screen, you have a few options. 

• Travel: This is the button that takes you between the Frog Refuge and the Wetlands.
• Camera: Pretty explanatory, you’ll be using this a lot to take pictures of the frogs.
• Journal: You have three tabs here that show Objectives, photos, and your journal that tells you keynotes about how things have progressed.
• Frogs: This is your Frogedex that shows you the frogs you’ve encountered and tamed.
• Stuff: Your inventory that holds objects and bugs.
• Editor: This is how you add items or move things around your areas.

Leveling up: As you tame frogs, you’ll be given +10 green hearts. These hearts add up over time and are how you level up. By leveling up, you unlock items and new features. There is something called the Wetlands Fanclub and you can sell them your items for less money, but you get hearts out of it.

All in all, I didn’t really run into any bugs except for one – well, other than the actual bugs. One of your first missions is to place down a log and chair. They were there before I went to the wetlands and were gone when I came back. They’re not placed, they’re not in inventory, and they don’t show up in the editor. So, I guess I spent that money for nothing. I didn’t have a glitch like that again, so maybe it was my error.

Final Thoughts

Lastly, we were fortunate enough to get a code on Switch as well. In fact, that’s what we initially asked for and received. But, when I tell you that I HATED this game on the Nintendo Switch, I truly mean that getting a Steam code was the only thing that kept this game from being a negative blurb in our monthly round-ups.

The controls are keyed in a way that overly uses the Right and Left buttons – not triggers – and it was confusing. Add in all the elements of the game to controller rage and it just wasn’t fun.

All in all, this game is cute, the idea is fun, but the technical parts are kind of a slog. If you enjoy heavy-handed gameplay, then this will be right up your alley. But, if you’re looking to relax… this might be one you skip.

If you made it this far, grab yourself a cookie. If you want to try out Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge for yourself, you can get it on Steam, Nintendo Switch, or Xbox for $19.99. I highly suggest Steam over the others.

And, if you want to check out another review that we did, you can look at our thoughts on Pine Hearts.