Frogger: Walkable City asks what a frog might do in a car-free city

Frogger is a simple, classic title that has stood the test of time. The player controls the titular frog and just tries to get home. To get there, the frog must jump over logs, avoid alligators and try not to end up as a traffic victim while crossing a busy highway. But what if there were no cars? What if our friendly frog could simply stroll through a 15-minute city planned to allow for bike lanes, pedestrian walkways and public transportation? Wee industriesthe developer behind experiments like Myth FPS And Dr. Mario Insurance, is brave enough to ask that question.

Frogger: Walkable city is a 45 minute fan game made with RPG creator. In a world without cars, the frog can explore freely. At first everything seems peaceful and quiet. I stop to talk to someone outside the farmers market, and they proudly tell me that they can run this farmers market 24/7 thanks to a successful civic planning system. Children run around a playground and celebrate their freedom in a city that is safely designed to meet their needs. Sure, there’s a cloaked stranger alerting you to a hidden part of the bar, but that’s probably fine.

The more I investigate, the stranger things become. I don’t want to spoil the fun, but within a few minutes of my first playthrough I came across a mini-mart. The nice young man behind the counter told me there was a coffee shop downstairs, so I went there. Dear reader, I regret to inform you that there was no coffee shop – just a cave full of blood goblins. It seems you can take the cars out of the city, but you can’t take the turn-based battles out of the city RPG creator game. Luckily, Frogger comes equipped with a folding chair and tongue slap, allowing me to defeat these new enemies.

You can play Frogger: Walkable city in your browser, and it’s worth a try: it’s a very strange game, perfectly suited for the transit-oriented gamers among us.