Frog It Up

Six Reviews, Mixed: Loved for Its Look, Criticized for Its Depth

Frog It Up launched on Steam on 17 September 2026 from solo-attributed developer and publisher Starfall Games, and at the time of writing it has six user reviews, four positive and two negative. The praise leans heavily on presentation: reviewers call it "very cute and relaxing," say "you can feel the progression, and it looks fantastic," and one calls it "absolutely worth the [asking price]." The most detailed review, however, is a negative one that opens by praising the same things — "the aesthetics and artwork are fantastic, the music, fantastic" — before pivoting hard on the actual skill-tree systems underneath, calling the prestige tree "overwhelmingly lacking" and describing several upgrades as not doing anything measurable. That's a real tension in the six-review sample so far: universal agreement that the game looks and sounds good, genuine disagreement about whether its systems hold up.

Lure Frogs, Grow a Pond, Build a Branching Skill Tree

The pitch, per the developer's own store text, is a "chill idle game where frogs swim, multiply, and sometimes just hang out causing pond chaos": click to spawn frogs, earn resources, and spend them on a branching skill tree that reshapes the pond and its ecosystem over successive runs. After a first completed run, the store page says different specializations unlock, letting players lean toward heavy automation, more hands-on clicking, or a more generic build. It's a familiar incremental-clicker shape — spawn resource, spend resource, prestige, repeat with new options — dressed in a genuinely distinctive pond-and-amphibian skin, complete with a slightly surreal backdrop of a ruined tower, a hovering UFO, and what looks like a ghostly spirit creature drifting near the ruins.

What the Screenshots Show: A Packed Pond and a Resource-Heavy Upgrade Menu

This outlet's own screenshots back up both the presentation praise and the systems complexity the negative review is reacting to. One shows the upgrade menu open mid-run: a click counter reading 5,408, four separately tracked resources shown with their own icons — a green gem at 18.3k, a water droplet at 2.5k, a pink worm-like item at 1.5k, and a yellow egg sitting at just 4 — alongside Restart and Upgrade buttons and three numbered ability icons along the top. That's precisely the kind of multi-resource structure the detailed negative review flags as poorly balanced, describing spending heavily into one resource type only to find a different one had become the bottleneck after prestiging. A second screenshot captures the pond at a much later, busier state: hundreds of small blue-and-green frog sprites packed edge to edge, a floating UFO carrying a blue alien, a ghostly spirit creature hovering near the tower, and floating "+20," "+70," and "+16" pop-ups marking resource gains in real time, with the side progress bar shown nearly full and green. Visually, it's a legitimately striking scale-up from the calmer title screen, and it's easy to see why reviewers keep singling out the presentation specifically.

Forty-Seven Achievements and a Prestige Tree That One Reviewer Says Doesn't Add Up

Steam lists 47 achievements for Frog It Up, many named after seasonal cosmetic variants — "Autumn Wilfred," "Autumn building," "Autumn UFO," and an "Eldritch Wilfred" among the highlighted set — suggesting a real cosmetic-unlock structure sitting alongside the numeric prestige tree. The detailed negative review's core complaint is worth repeating plainly rather than summarizing away: it describes unlocking red frogs after three separate prestige runs and never getting a practical opportunity to actually use them, and says there's no in-game explanation for how any of the cosmetic achievements are unlocked in the first place. That's a specific, checkable claim about a real design gap rather than generic negativity, and it sits uneasily next to the same reviewer's genuine enthusiasm for the game's art and music — a mixed verdict from someone who clearly wanted to like it more than they ended up able to.

Price, Platform, and a Reported Settings Bug Worth Knowing About

Frog It Up is priced at NZ$7.39 on Steam with no discount at the time of writing, is Windows-only, and carries no DLC, though it does support Steam Achievements. One reviewer, writing an otherwise positive review praising the art style, flags a specific settings bug worth passing along: dropping the display resolution too low in the options menu can make the resolution arrows themselves too small and imprecise to click, effectively soft-locking the setting until the player edits the game's configuration files manually to revert it. That's a narrow, specific edge case rather than a widespread complaint, but it's the kind of concrete, reproducible issue worth flagging directly for anyone who likes to fine-tune display settings before diving in.

Verdict

Frog It Up earns real, consistent praise for its art direction, music, and the sheer visual satisfaction of watching a pond fill with hundreds of frogs, and that much is corroborated by this outlet's own screenshots as well as by every review in its small early sample. Where opinion splits is on what's underneath that presentation: a branching prestige tree and multi-resource economy that its most detailed reviewer specifically describes as unbalanced, under-explained, and in places not meaningfully rewarding despite real investment. With only six reviews on record and a specific, credible complaint about depth sitting alongside genuine warmth for the game's look and feel, this is worth a look for players chasing a relaxing, visually charming clicker, but going in with tempered expectations for how much the prestige systems will actually reward sustained play.