Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge Review

Awesome and addictive game in which you try to attract and find all the different frogs. It has no missable achievements and takes around 17 hours to complete. 1 a 2 achievements is quite grindy

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 17 hours ( around 12 hours for the story and most of the progress and the last ~ 4 hours breeding the missing colors)
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote this guide, and Tasselfoot wrote a breeding guide.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, sleeping 20 times and filling the whole Frogedex are a bit grindy
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty options
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is such an addictive game. It feels a little bit like a clicker, but in other ways, it isn’t. Maybe Viva Pinata combined with a clicker game? However, in Kamaeru you get to this area where a childhood friend is building a frog refuge and you are there to give him a hand. You do this by placing furniture for the frogs, but also digging ponds and placing crops. The ponds also attract insects which you can feed to the frogs to tame them. And the crops produce goods which can be made into items that can be sold for money.

What makes Kamaeru as addictive as it is (I didn’t even want to look at any other screen or respond to chats/text messages etc) is that there is always something to do. From spotting new frogs and taking a picture of them, or maybe even feeding them to tame them. You also want to harvest the crops (which is easy, just press the button to harvest them all) and use those goods to make products, taking high-quality pictures when you unlock the option to make 3-starred photos. You don’t have to be active every single second, but you can be if you want to. And since there are 512 different frogs, you’ll be busy for quite a few hours). I really couldn’t put the game down, only did it because I had to sleep or work.

The achievements in Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge are very straight forward and it has no missable achievements. Most of them you’ll unlock by even thinking about them. digging ponds, planting crops, registering different frogs, all this you were doing anyway. However, one of the things you should start early on is sleeping, you need to sleep 20 times for an achievement and you can only sleep during the evenings/nights, so start early on with sleeping. |

There is also an achievement for finding every different frog and taking a photo of them or taming them (aka feeding them). This one will get grindy in the end because 2 colors you only achieve by breeding them. This will cost quite a lot of money but also patience. I recommend doing this as the last achievement because by that time you will have found almost all of them which can be found in the wild, you have easier access to money because of the different areas and goods you can produce there and you got the ability to breed those 2 special colors.

I had so much fun playing through this game and the frogs + some of the furniture are just so freaking cute (especially the furniture you get as a reward for catching fireflies later on in the game). I give Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge 4 out of 5 stars.

This review for Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge was written on 8 June 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 28 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.