When I got my hands on BUBBLE FROG DX (a big thanks to the developer for giving me the key!) I fell into a bit of an investigative hole. I felt I was being fed a fib! I was not entirely sure what the game was supposed to be. Is it an honest remake of some ancient GAME BOY game I never heard about? Is it a title made to resemble a game from that era and that console, but never meant to be one - riding the wave of nostalgia? I had to read all the game-related pages to finally figure out the simple truth. It is a GAME BOY COLOR game, made today (well not literally today) that you can get a real, honest-to-plastic cartridge for to play on your ancient handheld device. But it is also a game designed to be evocative of titles of that era of gaming, a perfect fit for a small and sweet GAME BOY title that would not look out of place on a shelf back then in the times of yore.
And it fits like a glove. Simple graphics, simple ideas, simple design. But let us not confuse simple with bad or dumb. There's beauty and sharpness to its simplicity, and I choose the word 'sharpness' with a bit of careful consideration, as your only real enemies throughout the game are spikes. Getting ahead of myself... In BUBBLE FROG DX you play a Frog. That is in a bubble. Phew, that's a lot of carefully crafted subtext to get through! You will be tasked by your friend - OniGary - who is, of course, a talking and cheerful onigiri person - to find his missing buddies, the little, well... Onigiris. You know, the rice and seaweed snack. As you can imagine, the stakes are pretty high, so you must make haste to get yourself through 50 levels in progressive difficulty and save as many of the little treats as you can!
How do you do it? With a single button. And quick, snappy reaction time. You see, the entire game is about bouncing your little froggy fella in his delicate bubble up into the air. Each tap of a button propels him forward a little bit, and then gravity takes hold and lets him drift down slowly. You can repeat your button tappin' to get higher in rapid succession, and of course, control left and right the direction in which you're ascending as well as floating down. It's as rudimentary as it gets but executed really well. Controls are responsive and tight - you'll never feel like your amphibian hero is acting out of your control, being too floaty, or lagging in response time to your inputs.
The challenge lies in the level design. Very quickly we are introduced to the spikes, clinging to walls left and right. One gentle graze upon them will pop your bubble and force you to give the level a retry. No checkpoints, no lives... Keep going until you clear it up! As the levels progress we are introduced to funny characters whose entire purpose in life is to give us a little forewarning about some new difficulty awaiting us in the coming levels. For example, how about spikes that move? How about one-way gates, which force us to travel in certain directions, or form a movement puzzle for us to figure out? How about closed gates, requiring a key to be found first before we can cross them? There is more, of course - teleporters, switches, you name it. New mechanics are layered on top of old ones to make the levels grow in complexity.
Despite that, the game has a very nice way of handling difficulty. While the levels can grow to be quite a challenge, frustrating and quite punishing, the game has no demands for progression. The amount of onigiri you must collect each level is... none! As soon as you have an unlocked portal you can just flow through it to the next level, giving you sort of an easy skip to a stage that feels like it asks too much of you. You can also set your own goal, so to speak, and fetch only one or two of the onigiris before checking out. Sure, you might not get that completionist tingle, but it's a legit way to play, not punished in any way or form. This means you can reach completion even if you're as twitch-skill-impaired as I am!
BUBBLE FROG DX is a solid bit of nostalgic fun. Nostalgic in a very direct way, as it does, indeed, remind me of the time of was a young lad with my trusty GAME BOY, playing stuff that was meant to stretch a small game into longer playtime via difficulty. Here it's nicely addressed by letting you skip levels without completing them to the max. The game is short. Can be done in about an hour, if you're good at it... or 2 to 3, if you fail a lot and don't want to give up on too many of the onigiri to collect! It can tickle your fancy if you want a game focused on its main mechanic, a test of quick responses and tight control. For its very low price, it's quite a steal and a lovely trip down memory lane.
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