La Rana

Overview #

What’s up gamers, quick one for today. Quick game, and theoretically, a quick review… I am still being slow to review these things after writing them, due to various reasons involving being dead. But I am alive now. Tonight we have a game that is available on Steam for free, no strings attached, it’s just how much the developers (just some university student(s) apparently) thought it was worth. HowLongToBeat says it’s completable in an hour, so all I need to do is set aside some time and bam! That’s one game off the backlog. One more game I get to say I’ve completed. Fair enough, right? I mean what’s the worst that can happen, if it sucks, then all I’ve wasted is hard drive space/bandwidth and not any money, and not much time.

La Rana is really just a third person adventure game with a bit of puzzles, it lists puzzles as one of the features, but they aren’t really that much of a thing. It’s more of an adventure game with first person elements. Some have likened it to a 3D platformer, but that’s just because you jump across gaps automatically, it’s not really an action game of any kind. Just the kind of game where you relax and be a frog. No stress really. Not much to it, it is what it is. Which is fine. The main idea is to tell you a story about some frog and some snake from long ago.

What’s cool and what isn’t #

Well, it’s hard to be too critical of this game for not really being much, because it was never intended to be much. Certainly not bad. You hop around, you squirt water on statues, you have really basic puzzles like moving towers around or jumping on lilypads at the right time (if you fall into the purple water you just respawn on land), it’s not really too advanced. Just to complete the game. There are some extra frog statues that I didn’t end up finding, but maybe I could have if I was paying more attention, I don’t know if I can call the game difficult to 100% just because of that. Nice pretty graphics. Some nice water in this game. The game page’s description plays up the plot as being this really great epic story, but it’s not much more than what you would get out of the opening cutscene for some other game in the same setting.

This is where it gets tricky to review though… it is of course not the most amazing game ever, but my complaints with it are what is entirely expected of it.

Gotchas #

Doesn’t seem like the game has saving, since it’s designed to be played in about half an hour anyway. Maybe there is an autosave and a continue on the main screen, but I didn’t see it, and also PCGamingWiki doesn’t list any save directory so it probably just doesn’t. Also there are no graphics settings, and this is Unreal Engine 4, so it kind of just pushes your computer to the max whether you like it or not. I “only” have an RX 570 which should be enough for anything, and it does actually struggle a bit in some areas which is odd, I dunno how rich they expect me to be but I’d like to just turn AA down or whatever. It’s not even just Proton, I’ve seen others in the Steam community page talk about it too… it’s kind of funny to think that this small freeware game is one of the most demanding games I have on my computer, but there you go.

Being unable to go back to a previous level is kind of a bummer, I guess, if you want to aim for 100% and find all the secret areas.

Conclusion #

I have to give this is a solid 5/10 since it delivers exactly what you’d expect from a free short game, and no more than that.

I guess at this point, one questions what the purpose of it being there is. It’s not the kind of free-to-play game where they’re trying to take your money via microtransactions or whatever, it’s not a demo/prologue for some other game, the only purpose seems to be to showcase what the developers can do? It doesn’t seem like they plan on making a full game out of it. Either that or it literally was just some university assignment that they just put on Steam because they could. Not really sure.