Incremental Frog

Catch things, spend the currency, catch more things — that loop has been done to death, so the way a new entry earns attention is in the catching. Incremental Frog's answer is a frog sitting on a lily pad, tongue aimed by the mouse, snapping up flies, dragonflies, bees and butterflies as they drift past in timed waves. Rotate the mouse while the tongue is extended and it sweeps through several targets in one arc rather than snapping back after each one — a small trick the store page calls a "secret move," and it's the single best idea in the package. Behind that sits a large branching tech tree and a prestige layer, both visible in the game's own screenshots, both looking like the deep half of an "easy to learn, hard to master" pitch. Three days after launch, though, there is exactly one detailed account of what happens once a player pushes past the opening hour, and it isn't a particularly happy one.

A shooter wearing an incremental's clothes

Officially, Steam classifies this as Action and Casual — no Simulation, no Strategy, nothing that screams "spreadsheet game" in the genre field. The community tagging tells a more honest story: Incremental and Idler both sit prominently among the player-applied tags, right alongside Action, Shooter, Top-Down Shooter and Point & Click. That split matches what the screenshots show. This isn't a passive number-watcher; it's a real-time wave shooter with an aiming mechanic, a day counter and a countdown timer per wave, where insects have to be caught before time runs out and gold is the reward for doing it well. The incremental half — the currency, the tech tree, the prestige system the store page confirms is "available" — is real, but it's built on top of active, moment-to-moment play rather than replacing it. Buyers coming from genuinely idle games expecting to leave this running in the background are shopping for the wrong game; buyers who want an arcade shooter with persistent meta-progression are closer to the mark.

That distinction matters more than usual here because nothing on the store page, in any of the three promotional clips, or anywhere in the feature list says whether gold keeps accumulating once the game is closed. It isn't described as continuing, and it isn't described as pausing — the topic simply doesn't come up, which for a game wearing "Idler" as one of its own community tags is a conspicuous gap rather than a neutral one.

A tech tree that wants to be the deep half

The upgrade screen, shown directly in one of the official screenshots, is a large grid of nodes connected by branching paths, most of them still hidden behind question marks waiting to be revealed. The one node visible in full — Critical Multiplier, a flat +10% to the frog's tongue critical damage for 399 gold — suggests a fairly conventional incremental spread of damage, speed and economy nodes sitting behind that fog. The toolbar above the tree carries a reset icon alongside search, a currency shortcut and a target-lock toggle, meaning the whole tree can be wiped and rebuilt along a different branch without starting the run itself over — a respec option a lot of tech-tree games make far more punishing to use.

Layered above the tree is a separate prestige system, confirmed by the store description but not detailed anywhere on the page. The one player account with enough playtime to speak to it — 55 minutes, reaching a third prestige reset before quitting mid-session — describes the early resets coming quickly and then the requirement for each subsequent one growing far faster than the gold it pays out, alongside a complaint about a shortage of additional skills or abilities beyond the tree itself. One account from one very short session isn't proof of a systemic balance problem, but it's also the only data point currently available, and it describes exactly the failure mode tech-tree incrementals exist to avoid: the point where spending stops feeling like progress.

The interface, the presentation, and a doubler nobody asked for

The core wave view is clean and legible — a flat, colourful cartoon style with a light blue background, a green lily pad, and enough visual separation between the frog, the tongue and a screen full of insects that the action stays readable even when it's crowded. Damage numbers pop in red above each catch, and a day counter alongside a per-wave timer give the run a clear sense of pacing from the outside, even without knowing exactly how long each wave lasts on average.

The run-end summary screen is where the presentation gets more interesting for the wrong reasons. It tallies what was caught, breaks down new gold earned against the running total, and sits a bright "2x" button next to the gold figure with a video-play icon on it — a rewarded-video prompt to double that run's earnings. Steam's own content descriptors for this listing are empty, and nothing about advertising appears anywhere on the store page. For a free-to-play game that would be an ordinary, unremarkable choice. For a one-time NZ$6.29 purchase with no other stated monetisation, it's a genuine surprise, and one worth knowing about before buying rather than after the first run ends. It doesn't look predatory — it's opt-in, not gated behind a timer or an energy system, and skipping it costs nothing but the doubled gold — but it's still an ad mechanic in a game whose price already paid for the content.

What the numbers actually show

There isn't much to lean on yet. The Steam review count sits at exactly one, negative, from a player who logged 55 minutes. The live player-count check returned zero at the moment of looking, which for a three-day-old release says more about a quiet launch than about quality. There's no achievement list either — the trophy icon visible in the game's own sidebar screenshots appears to be an internal, in-game system rather than anything wired into Steam's own achievement API, which returned nothing at all when queried. The developer has been responsive in the way that matters most this early: a patch landed two days after launch specifically addressing bugs, performance and rebalancing, which is a better sign than silence would have been, even without knowing exactly what it changed.

Final verdict

Incremental Frog earns a 6 for the one idea that's genuinely its own — a mouse-swept tongue-catching mechanic with real aiming skill behind it, wrapped around a tech tree and prestige system that look substantial in their own screenshots. It doesn't score higher because the only detailed account of playing it describes the prestige math turning against the player by the third reset, because the genre's foundational promise of progress continuing while the game is closed goes unaddressed on the one page that would need to make that claim, and because a rewarded-video gold doubler is an odd inclusion in a game that already asked for money up front. None of that is disqualifying at this price, especially with a free demo covering the exact same loop sitting right next to the buy button — but this is a game still being figured out in public, by very few people so far, and anyone buying it today is closer to an early tester than a customer walking into a finished product. Wanderer players used to progress ticking over while they're logged off should go in knowing this frog stops working the moment the window closes.