10 Video Game Genre Flips That Blew Our MIND
7. Frog Fractions
Not many kids who lived through the '90s hold much nostalgia for those old ‘edutainment’ games. Outside of letting us get away with playing video games during school - albeit extremely cheesy, barren, and non-engaging ones - you won’t find many people screaming for the return of the genre anytime soon. So one might be puzzled about the motivation for developer Stormdancer to attempt to do just that.
Well… it turns out that was never the intention to begin with.
Presented as a simple Flash game, homaging the (happily) forgotten genre, you play as a frog in a pond supposedly doing fractions in the name of fun education. But two hours later, when the credits roll, you realize you haven’t done a single piece of mathematics. Instead, you’ve: ridden a fire-breathing dragon to shoot down enemy bugs, flown to Mars and become its mayor to implement new laws, gone to court and fight your case Ace Attorney–style, and explored the deep ocean in search of new species.
Who would’ve thought a game like this would span the arcade shooter, bullet hell, flight game, text adventure, economic sim, political sim, underwater exploration, courtroom drama, and visual novel genres - all while doing everything possible to avoid its initial promise of math equations.
It all works, because that’s the whole point… and it’s frankly hilarious.