A Frog's Guide to Eating Flies

A Frog’s Guide to Eating Flies is a grid-based puzzle game about a frog stretching its tongue in order to eat flies. Each level is a small new map with land and water that the player has to navigate while using rocks to anchor and stretch out the frog’s tongue. The game is short, and its art is playfully elastic, but it still packs a number of challenges.

The frog, controlled by the player, hops along one space at a time. Water and rocks restrict the frog’s movement, since it cannot stand on them. However, the frog is able to jump over a single tile of water or rock. Along the way, the player will have to make the frog eat every fly in the level. There are a few conditions for grabbing a fly: the frog must stand on a distinct tile, it must face the right direction, and its tongue must be long enough to reach the fly.

The frog’s tongue can be stretched out by attaching it to a rock and then backing up. At the beginning of every level, the tongue is only one space long; most of the challenge consists in finding the right alignment between frog, rocks and pieces of land in order to back up and gain a longer tongue. Unless it’s stuck to a rock or catching a fly, the frog will (quite naturally) keep the tongue in its mouth, but there is a counter on the screen in order to keep track of its length.

In later levels, the player will have to rearrange parts of the map in order to make a long enough runway for tongue-stretching. This involves floating water lilies. The frog can not only stand on the water lilies, but also move them around by attaching its tongue to a nearby rock and pulling forward, creating new paths in the process. Though the mechanics of the game are fairly simple, certain steps need to be executed in a precise order, and it can take a lot of thought and setup to catch those just-out-of-reach flies.

This description was written by Cay Macres and edited by Oriane Tury.