Lately I feel a certain weariness with the terms “wholesome” or maybe even “cozy” games, though I do tend to enjoy the kinds of games these terms bring to mind. Maybe it’s due to a perceived oversaturation in my corner of the universe, or because it gives me the same feeling as when a movie is described as “cerebral,” genres that can be applied both precisely and very broadly. Maybe it just gets thrown around too much in my corner of the internet. Maybe it’s just too hot right now and I need to wait for us to settle into a cold winter before I can fully appreciate it. Or just give me a wet blanket pass for this one.
Yet, during a recent two-month stint of being on-and-off sick and being on-and-off sad, Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge was actually a welcome wholesome reprieve for the few moments I thought to do something other than sleep and picked up my Switch for a distraction.
In this creature collector by way of a (sort of) farming sim, you work to restore the wetlands of your childhood home to nurture a safe place for a bunch of colorful frogs to come and hang out by placing ponds and planting native vegetation. You can tame the frogs that show up by feeding them their preferred bugs, which appear in the wetlands with increasing frequency as you improve the biodiversity of a given area. You can then entertain these frogs, and others yet to be tamed, in areas with fun little pieces of furniture.
It’s a sweet and unassuming game. It’s basic and familiar – you farm and manage resources (money and bugs, mostly) and you watch numbers go up through a bunch of different systems. While it’s not a revolutionary concept, these systems perpetuate themselves smoothly enough that it feeds into my desire to click things endlessly. You tame the frogs via bugs, you get the bugs via the wetlands, you build the wetlands by buying plants, and you make money by selling stuff made from the byproducts from those same plants. There honestly comes a point where the wetlands are producing too much byproduct to keep up with, and really this waste of potential virtual resources is the only thing I don’t like about this whole thing. Oh, and you get to see a bunch of cute little frogs. The frogs don’t do anything but hang out, but you can take photos of them, and breed them via a simple tic-tac-toe minigame to try and unlock new ones.
As you build up the wetlands and tame frogs and recruit the help and fellowship of other environmentalists, new areas open up. I only got to the third area at the time of writing this, so I can’t tell you how many areas there are, though judging by the available frog types, it may just be the three. Each area has its own unique premise, plants, frog type, new bug types, new characters and furniture. It’s the same formula with different set dressing, which could get tedious. The characters themselves are fleshed out distinctly, each having a unique reason for wanting to join in, like the estranged father and daughter sitting at different sides of the small map, trying to mend a strained relationship through their shared work. They’re like little side stories, another nice touch.
The art is clean and cute, the frogs are fun (even if all of them boil down to a pattern and two colors), and the music is pleasant and unobtrusive. The story itself is mainly there to support all the clicking and to help provide some context for the numbers going up. Simply put: a girl returns home to help her friend save their local wetlands, they grab the attention of others who show up with a variety of different backgrounds and abilities to add to the effort, and eventually this work becomes a tangible process that other parts of the world ask to adopt for their own backyard.
That angle of saving the wetlands and doing it out of a love for one specific creature (to the benefit of more, certainly) is so familiar to me. It’s like we all sat in the same sixth-grade class in the mid-2000s (or whatever) becoming more and more concerned with the plight of the Chinook salmon. Or orca whales, always the orca whales.
I can tell Kamaeru was made from a good place of earnest environmentalism, and it’s honestly a decent introduction to the cyclical and reciprocal nature of well-maintained natural systems. Again, it can get a bit repetitive, the farming sim element is more of a resource collecting element, and there’s not much to the frogs beyond something nice to look at, but I just can’t help myself with clicky games. I wish the wetland builder allowed you to drop consecutive plants instead of having you go through the selection menu over and over, and you can buy 3-packs of these plants, which helps a bit, but it’s like when the shortcut ignores the potential of the original problem. Also, if you get enough plants and ponds and critters on the screen at once, the frame rate does start to suffer, but so it goes with the Switch.
Overall, I say give it a shot if you really like frogs, like to click things, like to watch numbers get bigger, like to collect things, or if you just want to curl up and play a gaming equivalent of watching a bunch of ASMR TikToks before going to sleep. As for myself, I will continue to let these games preach the gospel of wholesome gaming to me in my times of need.
"A Decent Distraction "
Cute and earnest, it does what it does better than expected with a genuine nod to helping and healing nature.
