Title: Seafrog
Developer: OhMyMe Games
Publisher: OhMyMe Games
Release Date: April 15th, 2025
Platforms: PC via Steam
Price: $16.99 (USD)

Seafrog is an exhilarating, enjoyable ride from start to finish, that is equal parts Tony Hawk and Metroid, resulting in a genuinely original gameplay experience that I had a blast with. It is also a game with a single, rather significant flaw, but thankfully, it was never quite enough to ruin the experience. I heartily recommend Seafrog for anybody looking for something new and original.

Seafrog’s concept is straight-foward, but things are a bit more in-depth in practice. You play as a radical frog who uses a rocket-powered wrench to get around, acting in essence like a skateboard. At the most basic level, Seafrog has you skating your way through derelict ships, doing tricks and solving puzzles. In reality though, Seafrog is a game about exploration, with some light metroidvania elements, that requires a deep mastery of the numerous different physics-altering wrench upgrades. It is a much deeper game than what appears at first glance, and it feels great to play. 

It does have a number of design decisions that are in direct conflict with the core systems of the game, and it led to a bit of frustration for me. This is a game about going fast, and yet collisions with enemies is extremely easy and damaging. This is a game about exploring, and yet punishment for death is to yank you out of exploration entirely. I couldn’t fall quite as in love with Seafrog as I would have liked because of these prevalent issues. However the core gameplay is simply so fun, the vibes are so impeccable, the music is so fantastic, that I nevertheless had an overall excellent time with Seafrog. 

Audio/Visuals

Seafrog has a phenomenal soundtrack. Each environmental track perfectly fits the locale, the challenge music pumps you up, and the entire thing does a dazzling job of maintaining a high energy, and fundamental grooviness, from beginning to end. The sound effects are fantastic as well, when I close my eyes I can still perfectly hear the sound of Seafrog grinding on a rail. The game is a real treat for the ears.

Visually, Seafrog excels. This is a great looking game. It has a strong, memorable art style, and Seafrog himself is the star of the show. The environment of each ship is unique and vividly portrayed, with varied locales ranging from a derelict wreck being overtaken by a sea creature, to a fast food factory full of chickens and eggs. The game also has marked clarity for such a fast moving game. I never felt like I was struggling for information or overwhelmed by effects. The UI does a stellar job. And I repeat, I would absolutely buy a Seafrog action figure.

The atmosphere of Seafrog is a real strength, it looks and sounds fantastic. OhMyMe Games really nailed the look, sound, and feel of this game, and it went a long ways towards keeping me engaged when the gameplay started to test my patience.

Story

Seafrog is not a game with a grand story to tell, it is quite focused on the wrench-boarding action it provides, but the token story provided is cute.

Seafrog and his trusty, uh, USB stick best friend who talks like a pirate? Weird! Anyways, Seafrog and his mate find themselves being marooned off a ship they were employed on, and stranded at sea. After being sucked over a massive waterfall, they find themselves in a section of the sea that is full of derelict ships. After boarding the nearest one, The Hammerhead, they realize it might be salvageable, and could be retrofitted into a ship of their very own. Unfortunately, the furnace is entirely out of fuel, and more must be obtained from the nearby ships. Thankfully The Hammerhead’s cannon is powerful enough to launch Seafrog to the nearest ship, which he can strip of resources (in the form of golden barnacles), to provide fuel for their own ship.

The hope is that with enough barnacles, The Hammerhead will gain more of its former strength, and the cannon can reach farther and farther ships. Eventually, maybe, they can fully power The Hammerhead, and have a ship of their very own. One that they can’t be kicked off.

The story is simple, irreverent, and silly. It matches the tone of Seafrog perfectly. Seafrog does deserve his own ship, dangit, and you are going to make that happen!

The standout is definitely Seafrog’s delightful cast of characters. Of course Seafrog himself, our silent protagonist, is the star of the show. He’s one cool frog, no two ways about it. Leaping right out of the 80’s “cool mascot” craze led by Sega and Sonic, his design is fantastic and he has a strong presence. I would 100% buy a Seafrog action figure.

While Seafrog is the strong and silent type, his partner (the aforementioned sentient USB drive with the personality of a pirate) is MUCH more talkative. He aids Seafrog by plugging into the ships he explores and operating the electronics. He also serves as the exposition dumper, what plot Seafrog has, is generally delivered via our digital pirate friend.

There are also many side characters who can be met out on the ships, and they are all delightfully quirky, such as a crybaby ghost who is scared of living things. Her story evolves as you repeatedly rescue her, and she slowly becomes less scared of you. The side characters are relatively minor, but I looked forward to meeting them. 

Seafrog’s narrative does exactly what it needs to. Provides enough motivation to give you a purpose, and focuses on a delightful roster of characters. It is charming and entertaining.

Gameplay

The core of Seafrog’s gameplay is immensely fun. The “I sometimes had trouble putting it down,” kind of fun. Unfortunately, Seafrog also loves to get in its own way via a few perplexing design decisions that seem to directly clash with what makes the game so good, which is the wrench-boarding and exploration. Seafrog isn’t a long game, but it took me a while to beat, because these issues became egregious enough that I often had to put the game down for a time, out of pure frustration. The fact I kept coming back is a testament to how genuinely fun Seafrog can be.

At its core, Seafrog is a game about skateboarding. Well, wrench-boarding I suppose.

As the titular Seafrog, your primary method of traversal is a huge rocket-powered wrench that acts like a hoverboard, and in practice, handles like a skateboard. You are thus left with a sort of 2D sidescrolling take on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. As Seafrog rides his way through the derelict ships, he will notice they all seem to be suspiciously perfect for boarding through, complete with ramps, rails, quarterpipes, and more skate park staples. The environment can be tricked off, and stringing together tricks builds a score multiplier that can lead to some truly massive scores.

Score-chasing is but a facet of the very multi-faceted Seafrog. Disguised as a 2D skateboarding game, it is actually a puzzle-solving exploration game with light metroidvania elements.

Your cannon needs to be powered up with golden barnacles, which are found in the ships you are exploring. Each ship is broken into multiple zones, and each zone is further divided into a set of rooms, which can be entered through a clearly displayed door, ala Kirby’s Dream Land. Each room contains some sort of challenge, and completing it gives an award. Sometimes this is golden barnacles, other times it is an upgrade to your wrench, or perhaps a switch that can be flicked. A certain number of switches must be flipped in order to advance to the next area, and the next set of rooms. 

The challenges in these rooms are the heart of the game, and they have a delightful variation. One challenge may have Seafrog navigating a Super Meatboy-esque boobytrapped obstacle course requiring perfect control, whereas another may ask Seafrog to reach a certain score within an allotted time. Others yet are exploration-based rooms which simply require finding the hidden reward amidst a large room, and there are a good number of other challenge types still. Completing room challenges is the beating heart of Seafrog, and it is a compelling system.

Eventually, you will gather enough golden barnacles to increase the strength of The Hammerhead’s cannon, and blast off to an entirely new ship. The kicker is that you won’t be able to entirely explore a new ship right away, because Seafrog has light metroidvania elements. Eventually your wrench will gain new powers, such as the ability to boost through the air for significantly increased vertical distance, and this allows you to make jumps that were out of reach prior, and for new areas to be reached in older ships. This introduces a bit of backtracking, but it is the fun kind that I looked forward to. It is really cool to go back to old areas and blaze through them with your new upgrades, to be rewarded with a brand new room.

Enemies can be dispatched primarily by dashing through them, though many enemies have more involved weaknesses that may involve dashing from different angles, or utilizing the wrench upgrades. I found the hitboxes to be rather unforgiving, which was unfortunate considering Seafrog’s low health total. He can’t afford many mistakes before he croaks. In the second ship in particular, where you sometimes run into massive clumps of enemies, it was not uncommon for me to collide with a cluster of enemies and die in seconds, and this leads into, by far, my biggest issue with Seafrog.

As much as I want to wholeheartedly love Seafrog, to champion it as one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played in 2025, there is just one trifling mechanic that I rub up against so uncomfortably, that it actively dampens the entire experience for me. This is the death mechanic. 

In Seafrog, when you die, you are warped all the way back to your base ship. That means if you are deep in the bowels of another ship, and you accidentally meet your end, you have to manually travel all the way back to where you were. If you’re struggling with a specific room, it becomes twice as difficult because failure means having to retrace your steps instead of being able to give it another go. Each ship does have a teleporter room that can be accessed from The Hammerhead, but I found this to do little to mitigate the issue.

I’m not sure why Seafrog needs a punishing death mechanic, it feels as though it directly clashes with what makes the game so fun. This is not a Dark Souls-esque experience where progress is the reward, it is a game about going fast, doing cool tricks, and exploring old ships. Seafrog can bring on such a fantastic flow state, only for it to be annihilated after you accidentally run into a few enemies, get sucked back to the hub ship, and have to spend five minutes getting back to where you were before. Stack that with some hitboxes that occasionally feel questionable, and some routes that require extremely tight precision, and you have a recipe for a lot of warps back to The Hammerhead.

The way that Seafrog undercuts its own flowstate reminds me a lot of the classic Sonic the Hedgehog conundrum. The classic Sonic titles were about going mindblowingly fast in theory, but in practice, that momentum was constantly halted by platforming segments and maliciously placed enemies. Seafrog suffers from the same fate. I’m not sure why they chose to interrupt your flowstate with such a punishing death mechanic, I wish it merely sent you back to the beginning of the section of the ship you are currently exploring. 

This was a big point of contention to me, and it led to me putting Seafrog down, often for what I thought would be forever. It is a testament to how enjoyable the game is in general, that I constantly found myself returning, and eventually pushing through to the end. It certainly was not without a share of frustration, however.

Final Score (4/5)

Seafrog is a very good game that is a single optional setting away from being great, fantastic even.

There is so much to like about this game. The visuals are fantastic, the soundtrack is pulsating. The skate-vania exploration oriented gameplay is refreshingly original and feels great. Seafrog is 90% there for me, unfortunately the 10% held back by the harsh penalties for dying, has a disproportionate effect on my overall enjoyment. I find myself utterly in love with Seafrog, until I fatally fall into a cluster of chickens, am warped back to The Hammerhead, and must make my way all the way back to where I was. It totally annihilates the flow state, and what a shame that is, because the flow state is so darn enjoyable.

If you have more patience for harsh death penalties, Seafrog might be the perfect game for you, but I would hazard to say that it is worth checking out for everybody. I loved Seafrog, but I also struggled to get through Seafrog. This is a good game, a step away from being truly great.

Featured Image: OhMyMe Games

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