Another Nintendo Direct passed without a word about Mario, and that leaves a gap in the platforming calendar. Croak, the debut title from Montreal studio WoodRunner Games, wants to fill it with a round, cursed Frog Prince whose tongue doubles as a grappling hook.
That tongue is the entire design. Studio CEO and co-founder Max Petroff told Polygon the team deliberately refused to bolt extras onto it: “We didn’t want to have any power-ups and stuff. We wanted to have one core mechanic and push it to the maximum.” The tongue grapples, gobbles objects and spits them back out, with one hard limit — you can only latch onto something that is near you. Bounce physics do the rest, turning the frog into a pinball that ricochets through a level.
The studio’s reference points are openly stated: Super Mario World and its Kaizo romhack scene, Super Mario Maker, Celeste, Cuphead and Super Meat Boy. Croak is a precision platformer, but a forgiving one. Petroff describes short, self-contained puzzles where progress is never rolled back, so a brutal segment stays beaten once you beat it.
From duck to frog prince
The hero did not start amphibious. Animator Tina Nawrocki, a lead animator on Cuphead, recalls the protagonist beginning life as “a little fat duck” in a project then called Quack. The tongue-grapple idea forced the species change, and a brief spell as a cape-and-hat Western frog gave way to the fairy-tale original. Nawrocki says she ended up animating 99% of the game by hand, frame by frame; fellow Cuphead alumnus Joseph Coleman contributed one boss fight, a mouse with a shoe. Steam’s listing also credits artists from Rick & Morty.
Nawrocki’s habit of drawing everyone short and pudgy fed back into the writing, which is now stuffed with food. The gobble mechanic once had a visual tell where the frog puffed up while carrying something, and an even chunkier variant was prototyped before being scrapped in favour of a permanently round design.
Levels get greyboxed in black and white with no animation at all, then handed to the studio’s Discord for playtesting. Petroff cites the fourth biome, where flowers swallow the frog and spit it out, and players immediately asked why they could not tongue the flowers and be launched pinball-style instead of straight up.
Where to play it
- Demo: free on Steam since February 19, 2026, covering a glimpse of the first biome — 5 levels, one boss fight, 11 medals and 1 hidden expert level to unlock
- Platform: Windows, with Windows 10 or newer listed in the demo’s requirements
- Release: the Steam store page lists the full game as 2026; Polygon reports the Frog Prince is expected to arrive before the end of the year
No price has been announced for the finished game. On the evidence of the demo, the frame-by-frame animation alone earns Croak a place on the shortlist, and the tongue makes it stick.
