Glittermitten Grove

Glittermitten Grove, when a joke goes on for just a little too long. This game is the next installment in the much discussed Frog Fractions franchise, and it's so committed to the joke, it doesn't even tell you it's part of the series. This game starts its life as a simple, and fairly slow, city builder where you are creating a society for small fairies who live in trees. If you're interested in city builders, this is VERY bare bones, but it's mostly just a way to get you used to the pace of the game before the true nature of things unfolds. If you play this city builder for about and hour or two, you'll unlock the next portion of the game. I won't go into detail as to what comes next, as the best part of this game is finding all the different games you're asked to play and figuring out how to play them. However, that's also just about the ONLY fun thing in this game. This game plays a bit like a rogue-like game where you'll be starting over from the beginning over and over again. There's also zero direction in what you're doing, how you should do it, and what the point of it all is. Bottom line, one of the reasons the original Frog Fractions so memorable to those who played it is how short it was. You can complete that entire game in about the same amount of time it takes just to get started in this game. I've put in about 7 hours into this game, and as far as I can tell I've made it relatively far, but it's just not worth it anymore. Looking at the same rooms over and over again, hoping to find the next mcguffin I need to progress the story state, all while having to move my sword around to keep it from blocking my movement is REALLY annoying. Hence, this game is a joke that goes on a little too long. It's fun, it's funny, and it's got charm, but you can only entice people with weird and zany jokes for so long before they no longer have interest.

Don't be fooled: This is no ordinary city builder or management sim. This is a game about sheer survival. When winter hit, my fairies faced terrible disparities. Berry rationing, no insulation, and the dark dark winter tearing away at their spirits and their bodies. Do not assume that this is a comforting game, because this game will only bring you struggle.

The game you see on the screenshots, the game I thought I bought - I managed to play it for 30 minutes, and it was a rather undercooked colony sim with a few neat ideas, but with shallow mechanics and poor feedback. After those 30 minutes I reached the bottom of the map and found out that this game isn’t a colony sim, but a bunch of minigames stitched together in a DOS-like dungeon adventure. Apart from being falsely advertised there is another huge problem here: most of said minigames suck. At best they are tolerable, at worst - very frustrating. The hub world/adventure part quickly becomes annoying due to your sword being a physical object - and you being forced to constantly rotate it to fit through narrow pathways. The humor wasn’t funny, the references were lame, nothing in this game worked for me. I guess you have to be some sort of fan that knows who the developer is, as most of the positive reviews are all written in a misleading way with inner jokes that are completely lost to the outsiders. TL/DR: the game isn’t what is shown on the store page, but a set of lame minigames, avoid it.

Only real gamers understand the complexities of Glittermitten Grove

Go in blind. Wonderful little game.

Great City Builder! Dont know how to explain, but its just great! Relaxing, though at times it can be stressful if you cant get those damn tree branches to go your way. The secret level seems boring and I dont understand it. Maybe theres more to it for those who want to explore more of that game.

My review for this game is more of an honest review instead of the usual meme reviews left on here that gloss over the games twists to remain spoiler-free with that said, [b] SPOILERS AHEAD [/b] [h2] The Bait-and-Switch [/h2] Glittermitten Grove is an intentional followup to Frog Fractions (even more obvious by the end credits of the game). The fairy world shown from the steam page and in-game is the fake game that covers up the real game that begins when you descend into the caves and enter the ASCII-TXT world. From this point on, the fairy theme is essentially abandoned (unlike Frog Fractions) and the ASCII-TXT world becomes the main hub of progression. [h2] Fun Minigames, Zero Cohesion[/h2] To progress within the ASCII-TXT world, you come across and play various genre-shifting minigames to earn items and letters (letters needed for final portion of the game). In isolation, many of these mini-games were actually quite creative and could stand alone if expanded, I especially enjoyed the Dante's Inferno and Battle Chess games. Others are totally nonsensical but a funny concept, like having to shave Barack Obama's face under a time limit. My dissapointment with these games, though, are it's total lack of cohesion. Frog Fractions tied its genre-shifting minigames back to a central frog theme and progression, but Glittermitten Grove offers zero connection between the fairy wrapper, the ASCII-TXT world, and the mini-games. The game is just fetching arbitrary items to solve arbitrary puzzles. The lack of any narrative or thematic glue makes the progression feel unrewarding. When I beat the game, the game doesn't really culminate into anything, its essentially just [i]"Congratulations, you solved the puzzles! The End."[/i] The conclusion of the game is not satisfying and it was more relieving to have beaten the game than be happy to have experienced it. [h2] Clever Puzzles Tainted by Obnoxious Design [/h2] To the games credit, the ASCII-TXT world features many creative puzzle solutions. The mechanics for solving them are flexible enough that I was occasionally able to find unconventional solutions, which did feel good. Unfortunately, this aspect is minor compared to these two obnoxious design choices: [list] [*] [b]Fake Walls:[/b] Some critical parts of progression in the game is hidden behind 2-3 breakable walls hidden in random corners of the ASCII-TXT world with zero visual cues. It is the same artificial padding found in the original NES Zelda game, and it seems more obnoxious here because it feels designed to coerce the player into buying the games 2 dollar guide. [*] [b]Rage-Bait:[/b] This game is littered with items that are either straight annoyances, or items that grant buffs with very annoying downsides (like requiring precise sword angles to move between squares). At times, this is a charming aspect of the game that is a bit funny, but there are multiple instances where I feel it has no place and ruins the games flow. The most blatant one is the ending of the game where you control a worm-version of yourself that has intentionally unresponsive controls designed to mess you up over and over. This 2-3 minute ending segment of the game is instead an 8 minute slog because you have to fight the controls to make them do what you want. It ruined the flow of the ending, and the already unsatisfying ending made this rage-bait seem pointless. [/list] [h2] Conclusion [/h2] I don't completely hate this game: I streamed it to a friend, and collaborating to figure out the puzzles together was a good social experience. As the one controlling the actual game, playing it was a massive pain in the butt. You will not find the well-crafted and tight execution of Frog Fractions here. There are interesting individual pieces but they do not come together into a satisfying whole. I would not recommend playing this game, and I don't think I'd even recommend watching someone else do it due to how arbitrary the whole experience is.