Three years after the completion of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Frog Fractions 2 — the sequel to 2012 flash game Frog Fractions — has finally been released. Or, more accurately, it’s been discovered, hiding inside another game that was quietly launched on Steam earlier this month.
The discovery of Frog Fractions 2 comes after a lengthy alternate reality game (ARG) — one that saw its creators hide cryptic references to the game in 23 other indie titles, send a giant red button marked “launch FF2” through the mail, and dress a man up in a bee costume to pose as a “beesness analyst” to hand over a bucket of clues.
Players solved a vast ARG to work out where it was hiding
It’s a strange story, but one that makes a certain amount of sense to anyone who played the original Frog Fractions. Apparently a simple Flash game about frogs and fractions, Crawford’s free game had very literal hidden depths, opening up a new and exceedingly weird world to any players who dived under the surface of the pond they played on. A sequel would have to be just as weird, and so Crawford worked hard to keep his sequel a mystery, keeping his Kickstarter largely written in character and hiding his true plans for a follow-up.
“Most Kickstarters are very detailed about what you’re paying for, but the nature of this one is that you’re paying for a surprise,” he wrote in the 2014 crowdfunding session, explaining that he created the first game “explicitly to evoke the air of mystery that all video games held in the 1980s.” To keep that mystery, Crawford said he would not announce the game’s release, nor offer any sneak previews prior to launch. It wouldn’t even be named Frog Fractions 2. “It will probably be called something like Lost Kingdom: Reckoning, by Fork Bomb LLC,” he wrote. “Or Turbo Finance 2015 by Vespenta Holdings.”