tilt frog

With tilt frog, PandaBee Studios from Leipzig enter the commercial gaming market. While their next game Endzeit is already public thanks to the funding it received, with the rage game platformer tilt frog, the young studio wants to capture streamers and sidescroller enthusiasts alike.

Rage games are all the… rage. A genre of titles that are meant to be played with a community, mostly on stream, games like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or its spiritual predecessor Sexy Hiking are tailor-made to induce rage in content creators to amuse an audience. By virtue of their design, these games are often incredibly hard to overcome, making the actual success even sweeter for players and audience alike.

Rage games also often revel in wonky aesthetics or deliberately ugly designs to enhance the gameplay challenge with a visual one. But that isn’t necessary to make a good rage game. Proof for that is tilt frog, the newest game of PandaBee Studios from Leipzig. The studio, founded by a group of Macromedia Leipzig alumni, has made several serious games before and worked with a lot of companies in different industries a development contractors. With tilt frog, they are entering into the commercial indie game market. The studio’s following title is also already known, thanks to a funding announcement by the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM): Endzeit, a strategy survival game in the vein of Against the Storm and Frostpunk, has received 100,000 euros for the production of a vertical slice from the funding agency (we reported).

But back to tilt frog. The game is, like many other rage games, a precision platformer climbing game. The protagonist is a frog with a long, sticky tongue that sticks to walls and roofs. With it, players have to navigate the animal through gauntlets of spikes and over chasms to reach the top of each map. The physics will be an integral part of the difficulty here, with the frog bouncing and falling all the time.

With its cute graphics and more consistent, understandable platformer aesthetics and mechanics, the game wants to me more than rage bait for streamers, but instead fall in the category of ‘easy to learn, hard to master’. Helping with the cutesy are also different skins for the protagonists, so if players don’t like to be a frog, they can for example inhabit the body of a giraffe with a stretchy neck or a planting pot.

tilt frog releases digitally for Steam on 11 November 2024.