Breakdancing ghosts and cowboy corruption - a Frog Detective retrospective

Something I love about clay modelling is that you can see your fingerprints in the final product. I'm not very good at modelling, so I couldn't remove the marks even if I wanted to. But because of this, no matter the shape or ambition, each little thing I make feels distinctly my own. Indie games have this same quality. Filled with carefully crafted art and personal writing, each one feels touched and moulded, so much so that you can tell one artist's work from another within only a few minutes. Frog Detective, a pocket-sized series of interactive mysteries from the minds of Grace Bruxner and Thomas Bowker, is covered in these digital fingerprints.

If you're new to the world of Frog Detective, let me defer to the Steam page topline to provide the elevator pitch: You're a detective and a frog, and it's time to solve a mystery. From a gameplay perspective, that means you explore colourful 3D environments, spin cheeky yarns with anthropomorphic animals, collect items, take notes, establish motives and connect those most delicious of dots to solve curious mysteries of Haunted Islands, Invisible Wizards and Cowboy Corruption. Each game takes about an hour to complete, but they use every minute well - to be honest, I usually give at least a quarter of an hour to sticker-stacking my froggy friend's notebook anyways. As a protagonist, they're worryingly naive and well-meaning, often to a fault. Proudly the world's second-best investigator.

Worm Club has published three Frog Detective games since the green gumshoe's debut in 2018, the design depth and irreverence growing with each confident iteration. The third game, Corruption at Cowboy County, launched in late 2022 and features a sick ridable scooter and a much larger map. Alas, per recent interviews promoting the sleuth's swan song, Bruxner and Bowker are ready to move on to a new story. And fair enough! A fitting box set of the trilogy recently landed on Xbox Game Pass - the project Bruxner had once referred to as 'an experiment' is now a fully-fledged indie hit. With that in mind, now feels like a good time to look back at the series and investigate my own relationship with it.

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