Frog & Roll

Surfing, bunny-hopping and climbing are not new ideas. They grew up as unofficial physics quirks inside id Tech and GoldSrc engines — surf formed inside Half-Life and Counter-Strike 1.6 modifications, bhop traces back to Quake's air-strafing, and climb-style vertical routes have circulated on custom KZ maps for almost as long — and for two decades the only way to play them seriously has been free: a community server, a workshop map, a stopwatch you kept yourself. Frog & Roll, from newly credited developer Drunk Frog Studio, is a bet that those three disciplines are strong enough to sell on their own, wrapped in a first-person platformer with its own maps, achievements and leaderboards instead of borrowed level geometry.

The score-chasing structure

This is the part worth leading with, because it's the part that actually resembles the kind of progression Wanderer's readers track. Rather than one repeated obstacle course, Frog & Roll splits its content into distinctly themed maps — a mining town, a UFO-set map, a pool, a retrowave strip, a synthwave run, and a full seasonal cycle through summer, fall and winter are all named among the 17 Steam Achievements tied to the build. Each is tagged Time Attack and Score Attack rather than a single pass/fail state, and the store page's central promise — chase down "the records of your friends and the world's best players" — describes a leaderboard structure sitting behind every run, not a one-off completion checkbox. That's a real unlock ladder in the sense this audience cares about: named goals, a visible ceiling above wherever you currently sit, and a reason to replay a map you've already cleared once the clock becomes the actual opponent.

What isn't yet confirmed is how deep that ladder goes past the achievement list — Steam's global percentages only show a handful of unlocks logged anywhere (the top sits at 14.2%, the next two at 7.1%, and the rest at zero), which is exactly what a title one day old should look like and tells us nothing meaningful about difficulty pacing yet.

Three disciplines, one package

Surf asks the player to hold a sliding line across angled geometry using mouse movement and strafe-timing rather than the flat ground most platformers assume. Bhop is about landing each jump without losing the speed built by the last one, chaining hops into a run that gets faster the cleaner it's executed. Climb — the store page's own comparison point is Only Up — trades speed for precision, asking for careful, deliberate jump placement across courses that run both vertically and horizontally rather than up a single tower. Stacking all three into one game rather than picking one is an ambitious scope for a new studio's first listed release, and it's also the correct instinct: each discipline rewards a different kind of player, and a game built around only one of them would be a much narrower pitch.

What's missing from the evidence

A first-person movement game lives or dies entirely on how consistent the physics feel under a mouse and keyboard, and that's precisely the one thing nobody outside the developer has weighed in on yet. Frog & Roll launched with zero Steam user reviews in any language, no news posts on its feed, and no press coverage this review could locate. The genre's recent history makes that gap worth taking seriously rather than waving off: Bhop PRO, a similarly priced standalone bhop title, currently sits at Very Negative on Steam, with reviewers specifically calling its jump velocity "hard and random" — the one failure a movement game genuinely cannot survive. The counter-example exists too. Bunny Hop League, an older entry in the same space, sits at Mostly Positive with 196 of 279 reviews favourable, proving the format can work as a paid product when the physics land consistently. Frog & Roll hasn't accumulated enough of a record yet to say which direction it's heading.

Two details do work in its favour regardless of how the movement feels. Steam's category list includes Adjustable Difficulty and Playable without Timed Input — accessibility options this genre essentially never offers, since twitch precision is normally treated as the entire point. And the purchase itself is clean: a single NZ$24.99 payment (NZ$14.99 during the current launch discount), no in-game store, no premium currency, and nothing in the listing suggesting DLC is planned.

Two details work against it. Controller support is listed as fully absent — no Xbox, PlayStation or Steam Input compatibility of any kind — locking the game to mouse and keyboard only, which narrows the buyer pool for a $25 release. And Steam's own genre tags for the listing are Action, Adventure, Indie and Racing, none of which meaningfully describes a first-person precision platformer built around Source-engine movement tech; a shopper browsing Racing expecting cars is going to bounce off this immediately; the storefront metadata is working against the game finding its actual audience.

Value and final verdict

At NZ$14.99 during launch week, Frog & Roll is priced like a focused, single-idea indie game, which is a fair match for what it's actually delivering: three well-understood movement systems built into named, replayable maps with achievements and leaderboards to chase. Whether that's worth paying for a set of mechanics that have circulated as free community content for twenty years comes down entirely to execution, and that's exactly the part this review can't confirm on day one — no user reviews, no meaningful achievement data, and no independent voice yet on how the surf and bhop physics actually feel to play.

Six out of ten reflects a genuinely structured attempt at an underserved niche — real score-chasing depth, distinct themed content, and accessibility options this genre rarely bothers with — held back by a total absence of outside verification in a space where the previous paid entrant scored Very Negative for the exact thing that matters most. Movement-game regulars curious about a dedicated, achievement-driven package should keep an eye on the review count over the next few weeks before deciding. Everyone else should wait for that evidence to exist before spending on it.