I deeply enjoyed this year’s Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition showcase, but my main takeaway from the presentation was probably not the intended one: I’ve decided that 2026 is the year of the frog. Five of this year’s featured games — Frog Sqwad, Stretchmancer, Unshine Arcade, Awaysis, and Big Hops — include frogs in some capacity. A group of frogs is called an army, and they’re taking over.
From Frogger to the Animal Crossing franchise’s froggy chair, frogs are nothing new to gaming, but the amphibians appear to be increasingly prevalent in the industry as of late. I decided to look at the trends — when you search “frog game” on Steam, there’s an absolute deluge of results. Of course, some of these are things like $2 hentai games that cursorily involve frogs somehow, but many of them are legitimate Frog Games.
I opted to do a deep dive into the past five years of frog-related gaming, searching for “frog game” and noting how many titles were released each year on Steam. I’ll admit that I was somewhat arbitrary in what I counted as a legitimate frog game, largely only acknowledging titles with frogs mentioned in the title or prominently displayed in the game’s screenshots, but I still think it gave me a good snapshot of the 2020s so far.
The results clearly show a steady uptick in amphibian gaming in the past five years, with less than 20 titles in 2020, compared to almost 60 in 2025. To what can we attribute this rise in frog fandom? This increase in the animal’s place in the cultural zeitgeist can be seen a bit across other media, like Frog and Toad’s recent resurgence as Gen Z icons, so perhaps there was some crossover there, but movies and TV have largely not followed the same trend that gaming has.
What does this mean for 2026? With five frog games already announced before the year is over — and it’s possible even more of the games featured in the Day of the Devs presentation feature them as well, like the anthropomorphic animal-filled Rockbeasts — it looks as though 2026 could be the biggest year for frogs in gaming yet.
Honestly, it’s a trend in gaming I can fully get behind. Frogs are one of the easiest creatures to design as some form of weird little guys, who always tend to be a highlight of any game they’re in, and their stretchy limbs and sticky tongues lend themselves to a myriad of unique mechanics.
Several of the games featured in the showcase definitely take advantage of this, like the tongue swinging in Big Hops and the extra-long limbs of Stretchmancer. If these games do well — and, historically, games featured in the Day of the Devs showcases tend to — we could very well be entering a frog gaming renaissance.
