Review: Valley Peaks is overflowing with frogs and charm, but the game ultimately left me with a literal migraine

You’ve read the words above, you know what’s going on. So, let’s just address it straight away. Is Valley Peaks a bad game? Resoundingly no. I have some qualms about climbing bits raising my blood pressure even in cozy mode and having no sense of direction. But, what really just lands me on my ass is the graphics.

They’re fun and unique, but whether it’s the way things are shaded with crosshatching or how saturated the colors are; something about them just gives me the worst headache and it happens quickly. 

Valley Peaks: The game that I urge you to try the demo of first…

I would caution anyone to try the demo of Valley Peaks first. If the game is going to hurt your eyes, you’re gonna know in the demo. I can’t even play this game for 10 minutes without feeling a headache creep up. And let me stress that that’s not on the game, it’s just my own personal quirk. Perhaps an accessibility option can be added that puts a filter on the saturation.

However, since it’s my review based on my experience… just make sure you’re not dropping money on something that you can’t fully enjoy.

So, with that little disclaimer out of the way. Let’s talk about the actual gameplay. Valley Peaks is a game about a frog who visits Valley Peaks to set up radio towers on top of mountains. In doing so, you’re blanketing the area with a signal.

Apparently, this is a job that our dad started, but never got to finish. So, here we are, rising to the challenge. Dads like to climb mountains, I guess. To get to the top of the mountains, we have to climb. I played on a controller and I can’t even begin to imagine playing it on a keyboard.

To climb, you use your left and right trigger buttons. When one trigger is holding onto a rock, you use your left stick to head up and use the other trigger to take hold of the next foothold. Et voilà, you’re a climbing frog.

There are 11 mountains to climb and they all pose various degrees of challenge. Some are straightforward where you just climb, but follies start to get introduced pretty early on. First, it’s rocks with a timer that will break after so long, then rocks with even less of a timer, spikes jutting out from the wall that knock you back, and even carts on rail systems that move that you need to time correctly. 

Good thing there’s no fall damage.

When I booted up Valley Peaks, it gave me the option between cozy mode and challenging. You know your girl chose cozy mode and I still had a hard time conquering some mountains. My blood pressure didn’t love this game, I’ll just say that.

I’ll be honest, I only climbed to the top of two mountains and that’s because I got utterly and thoroughly lost. There is a map feature, but I feel like this game could have benefited from a pin system that would have guided you to where you needed to go. It didn’t help that the map is the kind that needs to be explored to be uncovered.

Not to mention that I’m easily distracted and this game is packed with collectibles to find. Seriously, there were nuts and bolts, mushrooms, polaroids, juice boxes, lost items, and so on. Naturally, I’m going to be steered off the beaten path by any shiny thing in the distance.

I’m not really complaining about the amount of things to find, I quite enjoyed that part. You just have to understand that squirrel-brained individuals need an easy way to get back on the path.

I’ll be honest, that’s kind of it. You explore the lands, do some fetch quests, and climb mountains to place radio receivers. There are some stamp huts dotted around where you can trade completed cards for things, but you have to conquer mountains to get those stamps. So, clearly, I didn’t do much of that.

I already talked about the graphics and I wish I didn’t have such a reaction. I don’t know if it’s shading, saturation, or just how things blur from the speed that you walk, but, woof. This is one of those games that I won’t be finishing simply because of my own ailments. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s not an interesting style deserving of some praise. It’s totally unique to me.

Apparently, there are mini-games… I never even saw any of those.

In terms of music, I turned it off fairly early. So, there’s not much to write about.

I mentioned earlier that it’s easy to get lost and that’s mostly because everywhere you look kind of looks the same. Looking at the map doesn’t really help to illuminate where I started and what I should do next. You’re left to do as you wish and while that’s normally a good thing, it didn’t work so well here.

I wish that “cozy mode” had been… cozier, but that’s just a personal preference. As far as actual issues, I wish there was a manual save or at least a menu that popped up confirming that you want to exit something.

I had to restart this game three times because I messed up once and didn’t understand the save functions. When I got the game, I booted it up and played about 10 minutes of it before I had to go make lunch. I closed the game and wasn’t prompted that I would lose any progress, so I figured it would be fine.

It wasn’t. I got dropped back in at the beginning just after the intro. So, I went through a second time and got just a bit further when I decided the music wasn’t for me. For some reason, my brain picked “menu” instead of “settings” and because I wasn’t prompted, it just cut back to the main menu. And then – you guessed it – I had to start over from the beginning.

Admittedly, some of that is user error, but it really shouldn’t be that easy to accidentally lose progress. I hope in future updates, they’ll patch in a window that asks if you’re sure and lets you know that your game will only be saved up to the last time it autosaved. 

Someone, please save me. No, really. Hit save.

So, where does that leave us? We’re somewhere in the middle of “good” and “just okay”. While I can’t play the game for personal reasons, I still had some qualms that left me wishing that x, y, and z were different.

Play the demo first. I’m not saying that because I think you may not like the game. If you have the same issues I do, you’ll be super bummed that you spent money on a game that you can’t fully enjoy.

You can check out the demo and the game for Valley Peaks on Steam and Nintendo Switch, but if you’re concerned about the visuals then you can check out our preview of Ova Magica.