A frog climbing out of a dirty pond
Grenouilles 3D is a co-hopping platformer where you play as a frog that is either climbing or falling, and usually both. The goal is to leave your polluted pond and find somewhere better to live, which means going up through 7 different environments, each with its own set of obstacles. Along the way you eat bubbles, deal with two fish and some weird flying creatures, and pass 3 recurring NPCs who will happily tell you how beautiful you look. The whole thing runs on a mouse only control scheme, so there is no keyboard to learn: you point, you hop, you commit to the jump.
Playing it with friends
You can play alone or team up with up to 6 friends, and the game is built around that. Falling is treated as part of the fun rather than a failure state, since it just drops you back into the group for another attempt. Proximity chat is in, so who you can hear depends on where your frog is standing, which makes the climb feel like a shared space instead of a lobby. Everyone picks their own colors and hats, so it is easy to spot your own frog in a pile of them, and there is a bit of friendly competition over who is the best grenouille.
Before you start
Expect a precision platformer with a cute, colorful, slightly surreal coat of paint: the levels are vertical, the hops need to be accurate, and you will fall often. The mouse only controls are the main thing to get used to before you judge the difficulty, since timing your hops with the pointer takes a little practice. It is family friendly and works fine as a casual session with friends, but the climbing gets harder as you go up, so a group that enjoys laughing at shared mistakes will get more out of it than one chasing a clean run.