Frog Detective: The Entire Mystery review

When all else fails, sometimes a bit of charm is all a game really needs to win me over. Over the years there have been plenty of games that without a bit of charm wouldn’t have been successful, whether you’re talking about the point and click goodness of Monkey Island or the wild ride that is Deadly Premonition. There really isn’t a whole lot to the Frog Detective Trilogy other than charm, but honestly that’s all it needs.

In Frog Detective Trilogy you play as Frog Detective, who is both a Frog and a Detective. It isn’t easy living in the shadow of the number one detective Lobster Cop, but with three cases to solve from the commissioner, Frog Detective is determined to be the best detective he can be. With his trusty magnifying glass and a keen eye for solving crimes, this lovable amphibian is ready to do some detective work.

The bulk of your time playing Frog Detective will involve you talking to colourful animal characters and exploring a small area for clues and items that’ll help you progress. The writing is absolutely the star of the show here, with ridiculously silly dialogue that made me smile throughout and even laugh out loud a few times. Whether it’s our green protagonist explaining how untrustworthy books are or a koala trying to write slam poetry, there’s always something daft and amusing going on in these lovely games.

The gameplay itself throughout the trilogy is incredibly simple, and generally involves finding the items that each character needs, and then trading them for something else until somehow a mystery unravels itself. Sometimes you’ll need to find something in the environment too, which you can use your handy magnifying glass to help with (which does nothing more than make things look very slightly bigger). There aren’t any puzzles to solve and it’s never a challenge to figure out what to do next, it’s just a stress free story full of whimsy.

All the silliness is really what makes the Frog Detective games special. The cases themselves are always pretty much entirely trivial, which just adds to the playful vibe. The first case involves finding out if an island is haunted, and immediately you find out that the major has been reading lots of ghost hunting books and just got himself scared of a noise in the night. The second case involves searching for an invisible wizard who is sitting in a house in plain sight from the moment you arrive in the village. There’s no piecing together devious crimes in these games, you’re just going along for the ride.

The games do evolve a little as the trilogy goes on though, with each one adding a new mechanic to play around with. Frog Detective 2 adds a notebook (which you get to decorate yourself with cute stickers) where you automatically write information about the characters you meet. It’s a fairly helpful tool for keeping track of what each character needs, but mainly it’s just for Frog Detective to write funny things about everyone he meets.

Frog Detective 3 has something much more exciting for you to play around with, a scooter. Set in a slightly bigger desert environment, you can use your cool new ride to get around quickly and even jump up to harder to reach places. It’s mainly just fun to hop on and mess around on the mounds that make up the sandy cowboy town though, and making you smile is really all this trilogy of games cares about.

Each game in the Frog Detective Trilogy takes around forty five minutes to an hour to complete, and there’s not a whole lot more than seeing the story play out to do in these games. Frog Detective Trilogy is the perfect palette cleanser for any gritty AAA-blockbusters you’re playing though, just don’t expect to be spending weeks beating this one.

The Frog Detective Trilogy has a specific audience that will absolutely love them, but if you’re looking for challenging gameplay or complex systems then this isn’t the game for you. Frog Detective is all about silly writing and even sillier characters, and if that sounds like your idea of a good time then this trilogy is the perfect way to pump pure happiness right into your brain.