I've marked this as complete but I genuinely don't know if it was, it just abruptly ended in the lift down to the mines and I don't know if that was intended or a bug... either way I was happy to be done with it. It's incredible how after 10 minutes of playing it, TFH was already overstaying it's welcome.
Tender Frog House insults my intelligence. It's framed as a conversation between developers about to release a 'cozy' game, and discusses the relationship between games as art and games as a product in the capitlist hellscape. And on paper I'm on board with this. The heavy philosophy and politics against the hyper-saccharine presentation, characters and music is quite disarming in a good way.
But the actual content that's delivered here... dear god. Tender Frog House has said everything it has to say within the first 2 minutes, and then just keeps on saying the same thing again and again in progressively flowery ways. It feels like artificial stream-of-consciousness writing penned by someone desperately trying to sound clever. It's bitter, it's cynical, it's patronising, contemptuous and scornful... ugh. I get it, TFH. Capitalism promotes unchallenging art and turns everything into products. There, I said what you said in 9 words; I didn't need any direct quotes from political philosophers that were so long they didn't fit on the screen.
Also the game is hideous. I get the impression that's intentional, but that shade of green burns my fucking retinas, and that music is acid to my soul. Some of the pixel graphics in the overworld look decent, but the lack of effort in the visuals anywhere else makes me assume these are just off-the-shelf stock assets.
So yeah, this is bad. I've spent longer reviewing it than I did playing it at this point and I'm not even mad about that fact because this game pissed me off. One star instead of 0.5 for the juxtaposition between presentation and content being an interesting way to frame something like this. But yeah, don't play this.
Tender Frog House insults my intelligence. It's framed as a conversation between developers about to release a 'cozy' game, and discusses the relationship between games as art and games as a product in the capitlist hellscape. And on paper I'm on board with this. The heavy philosophy and politics against the hyper-saccharine presentation, characters and music is quite disarming in a good way.
But the actual content that's delivered here... dear god. Tender Frog House has said everything it has to say within the first 2 minutes, and then just keeps on saying the same thing again and again in progressively flowery ways. It feels like artificial stream-of-consciousness writing penned by someone desperately trying to sound clever. It's bitter, it's cynical, it's patronising, contemptuous and scornful... ugh. I get it, TFH. Capitalism promotes unchallenging art and turns everything into products. There, I said what you said in 9 words; I didn't need any direct quotes from political philosophers that were so long they didn't fit on the screen.
Also the game is hideous. I get the impression that's intentional, but that shade of green burns my fucking retinas, and that music is acid to my soul. Some of the pixel graphics in the overworld look decent, but the lack of effort in the visuals anywhere else makes me assume these are just off-the-shelf stock assets.
So yeah, this is bad. I've spent longer reviewing it than I did playing it at this point and I'm not even mad about that fact because this game pissed me off. One star instead of 0.5 for the juxtaposition between presentation and content being an interesting way to frame something like this. But yeah, don't play this.