by 
If I were to review Glittermitten Grove as it appears above, I would comment on its overly-kawaii, not-really-amusing attempt at stretching the limits of the word twee. It’s not really a game that needed to exist….
….except as an excuse for a game called Frog Fractions 2.
Fair warning: spoilers ahead. Play Frog Fractions first. No really. Do that. Buy upgrades. Swim down.
The original Frog Fractions was also couched as a game that didn’t need to exist in the form of a frog playing a Missile Command/Space Invaders style game that may have had something to do with fractions. That wasn’t really the point – there was a whole other game embedded in Frog Fractions that led you on a journey of dragons, bug pornography, and space travel. It was a fantastic surprise that kept you wondering what would happen next. After that game, the creator launched a campaign to build Frog Fractions 2. It took a couple years, and no one really knew what became of it. There were hints in a massive ARG, which I missed. But you can read about it here. Frog Fractions 2 was created in the sewers and sky of Glittermitten Grove, behind a mysterious door.
So this is instead a review of Frog Fractions 2. I was excited for this. The first game had just the right mixture of madcap comedy and mystery, and the sequel promised a bigger version of it. The sequel just doesn’t deliver. It feels wrong to compare FF2 and judge it by its predecessor, but it also feels unavoidable. At the end of the day, FF2 just isn’t fun, independent of the original. To see why, we must compare it to the original.
The world of FF2 and the minigames within are all found by traveling through an ASCII worldmap. While I very much enjoy ASCII and pseudo-ASCII games like Brogue, Nethack, and The Ground Gives Way, FF2 seems to attempt a retro feel through terrible controls within that ASCII environment. Honestly, I have very little tolerance for bad controls. There is little worse than being able to see exactly what you want to do and not being able to do it because of the controls. There is an exception to my frustration: in Frog Fractions, there were occasional areas with ridiculous controls. Those areas were intended as a puzzle to figure out the controls, and were gone once you did.
In FF2, your main method of interacting with the world is terrible and doesn’t ever stop being that way – in fact, it only gets worse. You get a sword which takes up the space next to you, and half the challenge of movement is keeping the sword pointing in the right direction. That was amusing for about five minutes. But then it didn’t go away. The few mini-games I found within the world provided momentary fun, but recaptured little of the zaniness from the original that made me like it. One, which was a variation of Flappy Bird (another game with aggressively bad controls), was interesting but did nothing to relieve the pressure of bad controls (for obvious reasons).
I am sad to do this to a game I had so much hope in, but Frog Fractions 2 must go to Tier Three.