Frogatto & Friends is a free and open source 2D platformer, from the developers of Battle for Wesnoth. Despite the name of the blog, I don't cover a lot of games that are primarily made for Linux or in an open source fashion, so I thought this could be interesting.
It was surprisingly fun! The gameplay is reminiscent of certain other platformers: your character can swallow enemies and spit them out to hurt other enemies or clear obstacles. Simple, but it works, though I've no idea why they also include a fire-breathing ability... (Apparently the newer version of the game instead lets you infuse swallowed objects with elements like fire, which sounds cooler but I have not played with that mechanic.)
The first thing you notice when starting the game is the very competent pixel art. Not something seen in most open-source games as Linux nerds tend to not be great artists, or at least don't prioritize it. The new update (which can you look at on the game's Steam page) opts for a lot more 2D effects like rotation and skewing to make the world look more alive: IMO it looks a bit wonky when standing still, but when moving around, those newer effects do improve things a lot. The music and sound design is not as impressive but works fine, and the story was... well, it does subvert your expectations, but it ends up being a bit anti-climatic. Still, the game is fun, and gets an *8/10* from me.
I'm giving the game a bonus point for being open source and even being officially distributed on many modern Linux distros. The game uses a custom engine written in C++, which runs very smoothly with very little resource usage.
Game finished 2023-06-07
gardenapple - 2023-06-29
