Ah, we meet again, old nemesis.
I mentioned my coverage of "Deer" that I have "Frog" to thank for introducing to me to the Survival series, this being the only edition that happened to make an appearance anywhere within my childhood. "Frog" became my literary obsession for a brief window of 1995, staying with me and haunting me in the decades that followed, largely on account of my run-in with a lethally inconspicuous snake. The snake allegedly lurking in the river weeds that brought an abrupt and shocking end to my very first playthrough was both a nightmare and an enigma - I gazed at the illustration time and time again, never quite able to figure out where, among that eerie collection of indistinct shapes and shadows, the phantom serpent began and ended. Eventually my allotted time ran out, and I had to admit defeat and return the book to my school library, confounded for the fact that that dratted reptile had gotten the best of me. It's something that would cross my mind intermittently, until late in 2022, when it finally occurred to me that I could track down my own copy and have a second stab at it, leading to the mind-blowing revelation that "Frog" was, in fact, never a stand-alone title, but part of an entire range that had mostly passed me by. As I set about amassing the series, most editions came with the promise of discovering a perilous new world through a fresh set of eyes and figuring out from scratch how to navigate to safety. With "Frog", it was more about retreading the familiar and only semi-remembered, and the possibility of staring a long-standing demon into submission. That snake and I, we had unfinished business.
"Frog" marks a change of direction for the series, in that we bid adieu to Roger Tabor's involvement and get a whole new author in John Norris Wood, who actually seems to have done the heavy lifting in all areas - he's credited as our writer, photographer and illustrator. The change in authorship might account for why "Frog" feels a little less polished than some of the preceding editions, Wood being a newcomer who was having to figure out how to make the most of the concept. "Frog" is a perfectly solid addition to the series, and it naturally held a lot of value for me as a trip down memory lane, but having just played "Otter" and "Squirrel", arguably the two strongest Survival titles, its flaws felt much more apparent. Visually and atmospherically, "Frog" is well done, offering a fine balance between the picturesque beauty of our hero's aquatic habitat and the murky unknowns where hidden dangers are apt to be slinking below the surface. But it put me in mind of "Deer", in that some of the deaths have regressed to feeling similarly arbitrary, lacking sufficient contextual indicators and rendering the outcome as fundamentally a matter of chance, and less the result of any faulty judgement or inattentiveness on the part of the reader.
Like "Deer" and "Fox", "Frog" boasts only five possible death endings, as opposed to the six of "Otter" and "Squirrel", both of which feel better rounded for incorporating that extra fatality. Here it might have added a notch more depth and challenge to the gameplay - especially since there are a couple of opportunities for things to get nasty that Wood curiously passes up, including a predator stand-off that resolves entirely amicably no matter what course of action you choose. Overall "Frog" unfolds at a relatively relaxed pace, which to some might come as a relief following the nail-biting tensions of "Squirrel"; there's nothing really akin to those goshawk and marten encounters that plunged you head-first into the action, forcing you to make do or die decisions under flagrantly high pressure circumstances. It's definitely not because Wood lacked the ambitions of Tabor - in fact, there is one page in particular where I think Wood was maybe trying to be a whisker too clever and ambitious for his own good. I'll admit that a chunk of my initial frustrations with "Frog" were bound up in the impression that there is one scenario that not only lets you off the hook for what would appear to be an extremely careless rookie mistake, but
rewards you handsomely for it. Closer attention to detail revealed that that actually wasn't the case, and that Wood really had gone out of his way to establish a scenario in which the outcome is dependent on the interplay between seemingly disparate details; one in which the reader is rewarded for paying attention to what's going on in multiple regions of the page, as opposed to just spotting one potential danger and jumping to conclusions. For that, I give credit to Wood, although I have my doubts as to just how successfully this was going to work out in practice.
"Frog" is also notable for featuring our only non-mammal protagonist; as an amphibian, you'll find that your needs are a little different (since you need to keep your skin moist at all times), but the basic objective to eat and not be eaten remains the same. As a frog, you are a predator and will get your turn at dispensing doom to various invertebrates, but the emphasis is very much on how little and fragile you are in the scheme of things. So little and fragile that you might not be noticed at all, which may be a big source of your troubles so far as your human neighbours are concerned. Although most of the deaths are caused in some way by human activity, "Frog" is notable for being the only edition of Survival in which all of the human-related deaths are basically accidental. No human actually sets out to kill you, they just have a knack for spreading death and destruction wherever they go, and you're so tiny that they often don't notice (or possibly don't care) that you're there at all.
To face down that snake (and various other dangers) along with me, click below. There be spoilers. You've been warned.
- Death #1 (4) - Death by closed door: You go into a shed and some thoughtless human being closes the door on you. Your Achilles heel, as a frog, is that you need to keep your skin moist in order to keep your body functional, and that's not going to happen from inside here. You doomed.
- Death #2 (5) - Death by snake: At long last, we reach the Survival death nearest and dearest to my heart, it being the source of so much childhood anxiety for me. The question is - can I make out the snake now, and is it as embarrassingly obvious to my adult eyes as I'd feared? The answers are yes, and yes and no. As a child, I suspect I was thrown off in my search by this one rather troubling detail - you can make out the body of the snake, but unless I continue to miss something, not its head, and it was those gleaming serpentine facial features I was most expectant to see (there is something I thought might be its head, but it looks like it's physically attached to a plant trailing into the water, so I don't know). Now that I've identified at least part of the snake, I should feel like I have all the closure I needed, but I remain haunted by those snaky mirages I was convinced at one time were staring up at me from that treacherous abyss; the way the light shines on the surface of the river, I see them just as vividly to this day. A nightmare and an enigma it must remain.
- Death #3 (6) - Death by ill-advised road crossing: If you're a seasoned Survival player, then you should have picked up by now that roads are to be avoided at all cost. Whether you're a deer, a fox, an otter or a frog, you have no immunity to a 1.5 ton pile of metal bearing down on you at 40 miles an hour - and when you inhabit a form as tiny as a frog, you have NO chance of being seen by any driver. Although what's egregious about this particular variation is that you're given a choice between two routes that seem just as likely as the other to end in disaster - either you can go across the road or down a drain, with no indication, visual or textual, as to which is the riskier option. From the outset, the drain doesn't seem that much more inviting - I learned from my experiences as an otter investigating a pipeline and a fyke net that it's not advisable to enter into anything where it's not an automatic given that you're going to get out again (see also: our above misadventure with the shed door) - but if you dive in you'll discover that there is a pipe leading to a pond that provides a handy exit. Wood emphasises that you were extremely lucky in this regard, and that had the pipe not been there, you would have been trapped in the drain and eventually drowned. He makes an effective point about the kinds of hazards we might unintentionally create for wildlife by modifying their environment, but this one really felt like it came down more to luck than logic - or déjà vu, for those playing these in order.
- Death #4 (12) - Death by turned worm: Here's another "Frog" death that I find somewhat arbitrary and confusingly implemented. If you go into the garden you'll get a choice of three prospective meal targets - an earthworm, a butterfly and a snail. Go for the first option and you'll shortly discover that the worm had been poisoned by insecticide, and alas, now you are too. As a death, it makes sense, and carries obvious environmental implications, but what visual indicators do we have to go on that the worm is an ominous choice - as opposed to the butterfly and the snail, which are active in the same tainted vegetable patch, but apparently fine? We'd had a comparable scenario in "Otter", with the sickly fish that was easy to catch but deadly to eat, but there you could piece it together using simple logic that the fish's blatantly weak condition was probably not a good sign. With the worm - I don't know, there are tubs at the back of the garden, which might be a clue that chemicals are in use here, but there's just no way, that I can see, to tie the threat specifically to the worm and neither of the other potential prey items. The whole thing plays suspiciously like a game of garden roulette to me; the snail could just as easily have been the fatal option, and it would have made every bit as much sense (the butterfly, I suppose, isn't actually touching any of the vegetables).
- Death #5 (19) - Death by heron: Well shoot, the sunlit bank on other side of that lake looked so picturesque and inviting. Close inspection of the scenery, however, would reveal the spiky, spindly form of a heron lurking alongside your route, only partially obscured by the rushes, and yeah, you can tell straight away that he's a menace.
Other observations:
- So, that rookie mistake I mentioned earlier...on page 2, Wood alludes to some movement in the water, suggesting that it might be prey "or something more sinister". One of your options is to swim over to the bank on page 3 for a better look - except, if you're at all attentive, you'll notice that lurking amid the lily pads in the left-hand corner is something distinctively fishy-looking, and that swimming to that bank is going to take you directly into its path. And that's an outcome to be avoided at all costs, right? You would think, except if you advance to 3, you'll get a whopping FIFTEEN POINTS because the pike ended up going for an angling float and not for you. Whut? Initially, I was all abuzz with the conspiracy that the pike encounter was originally written as a death ending (since "Frog" only has five), but Wood's editor had convinced him to change it at the last minute so as to make the book a smidge less punishing. Studying the illustration more carefully, I can see how Wood was carefully laying the ground for this double twist, since there is also this strange yellow object protruding from the waters between yourself and the pike; I had previously assumed this to be some kind of aquatic grass, but I guess that's our float. Nicely played, Wood, although I still suspect that most readers who turned to 3 did so because they hadn't seen the pike, and not because they'd discerned the presence of the float and realised that they had an out. In practice, this was very likely rewarding carelessness more frequently than attentiveness.
- There's also that predator stand-off involving a duck where it's actually impossible to lose. Stay perfectly still and the duck doesn't see you (since your camouflage is top notch), make a bolt for it and the duck doesn't follow. Usually, when the text talks about taking an action and hoping that the predator isn't good at counteracting, it's a hint that you may be underestimating your opponent and should rethink your choice. Not here, however. I get the impression that this duck may be the dopiest predator in all of Survival.
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