Glittermitten Grove is a fairy forest management game where you accumulate food and other resources in other to maintain a thriving fairy population. You use these fairies to build more buildings and help you collect mana in order to cast spells to grow trees and do other things. It's a neat little game and I find that the act of managing how trees grow (if you stack too many buildings on one side, the tree will collapse) and the need for trees to get a lot of sun to be real interesting. It is not, however, the reason why I got Glittermitten Grove. I'm talking about Frog Fractions 2; Hidden inside this other game is a product following a classic misdirection entertainment product about a frog eating flies to teach kids about maths. It's pretty tough to do misdirection when people are expecting it, but Frog Fraction 2 manages it admirably.
Frog Fractions 2 takes place in 'TXT WORLD' which is based on some other game called 'ZZT' which I never played, so there is no nostalgia for me in this concept. You are a smiley face moving around the world, trying to find symbols, keys and other items in order to solve puzzles. The game is full of meta layers and jokes that I won't spoil here, but you need to do a lot of wandering around in TXT WORLD, perhaps even too much, at some point I was quite lost and couldn't get to the next funny bit, which almost led me to look at a walkthrough. The game is full of funny little mini-games which were, for me, the real draw of Frog Fractions 2 and by consequent, while you needed to find them in order to get items to solve puzzles later on, I was doing the opposite. I wanted to keep progressing in the game in order to see the next weird thing.
And the next thing was, indeed, weird.
Some of the mini-games are genuinely difficult (but I feel that if you perform too badly at it, the game gives you some slack on later rounds) and you don't need to complete them entirely to get the prizes required. They're all mostly good, but some are really great, the best moments in gaming I've had in a long while, which is commendable since I was -expecting- crazy zany stuff. And the stuff around it - moving around in TXT WORLD, solving puzzles while using swords and bridges and time-controlling devices, was also interesting, although not on the same level.
I really liked Frog Fractions 3! I think I finished the whole thing and played all the minigames. Here are some real screenshots from that are entirely from the game I swear.
