I love frogs. They’re adorable and probably my favorite animal. I also love Vampire Survivors, the addictive and arcadey game that is maybe a bullet hell and maybe a roguelike. Enter Pesticide Not Required, a game that is basically Vampire Survivors mixed with a light farming sim and starring a cute cast of frogs. I’ve been playing it for the past week and am completely hooked.
You start with Joe, the little frog on the logo and title screen, and a simple objective to survive a season on your farm. You have a few plots to start with, plus a couple of ponds for fishing and some ores that can be mined. Crops take the form of either normal plants or weapons. Normal crops give you experience points, while harvesting weapons first gives you the weapon in question and later levels it up. Fishing also provides experience, while mining yields gold. Each time you level up, you are given a choice of various upgrades. Some are straightforward buffs to specific stats and probabilities, and some are tradeoffs between multiple stats.
As you plant, water and harvest your crops, waves of pests will arrive to attack, and you must fend them off with your weapons of choice. Joe starts with a tongue lash attack that’s suspiciously similar to the whip from Vampire Survivors, while the other frogs each begin with a different weapon. Each morning, a shop run by the Merch-Ant opens that offers weapon seeds, normal seeds, more plots and pets in exchange for gold. Pets can help with a variety of tasks, such as taking care of your crops for you, attacking enemies and retrieving loot from across the map. Boss enemies will occasionally appear, who will drop EXP, gold and chests containing new pets upon defeat. Once you reach the end of a run, your character becomes Wumbo and grows to massive proportions, allowing remaining enemies to be effortlessly stomped while looking delightfully silly.
Each of the four seasons can be played in the game, and there are multiple levels of increasing difficulty for each to choose from. Between rounds, you are placed in your frog’s home. Your abode can be decorated, and so can the garden out back. There is also a big selection of persistent upgrades to purchase, to make future runs easier. While at home, you can also go to bed and change frogs. There are over a dozen frogs to unlock, and they’re all adorable. They include such characters as Greg From Accounting, who sports a tophat and monocle and has buffs related to coin gains, Hue Mann, who is definitely not three frogs in a trench coat, and the valiant knight Sir Hopselot.
Playing around with the various frogs and loadouts is tons of fun. There are also some neat challenges I wouldn’t have thought to try without seeing them in the unlock list, such as killing a boss within 5 seconds of it spawning (better get that crit rate up!) or winning a run without ever disturbing the ducks in the pond. With weapons like a bonk hammer, rolling hay bales and yo-yos that swing around you, gameplay is often both hectic and hilarious.
I’m currently closing in on the final few achievements and in-game unlocks, and have no desire to stop playing. Pesticide Not Required has been a pleasant little surprise for me, as I wouldn’t have even known it was coming out if not for Steam recommendations. It’s one of those fun experiences where I sat down to try out a run when I had some free time, only to look up and realize that 3 hours had already passed. It’s the best bang for my buck I’ve gotten in quite some time. I love a game that’s cute and fun in equal measure, and I think it’s going to be tough for any other games of 2024 to best it in those categories for me.
Kay Talks Games 