In 2024, I made it a New Year’s Resolution to play 60 games to completion. That comes out to five games finished per month, so in my quest to stay on track, I turned to shorter games. Lucky for me, all threeFrog Detectivegames are onPC Game Pass, and you can knock out the trilogy in a total of five hours.
Playing those games, which follow a sweater-wearing frog as he solves low-stakes crimes, made me begin to wonder why so many game developers seem to be drawn to making games that star animals as police (or, at least, private investigators).
The Long Frog Leg Of The Law
Frog Detective is one example, andTails Noir(previously titled Backbone) is another. That 2021 game cast players as a raccoon private eye in a dystopian future. The trend is still going strong. DuringNintendo’sIndie World Showcaselast week, another animal crimes game,Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, got a trailer for itsSwitchrelease next month. That’s not even the only fowl police game on my radar right now. At PAX East last month, my colleague Gabrielle Castania playedChicken Police 2: Into the HIVE!
This is a bizarrely bustling subgenre and I’m not sure how or why that is. Is it all downstream from Zootopia?Disney’s animated film about a cop rabbit who befriends a con artist fox was a gigantic hit in 2016, grossing over a billion dollars worldwide. Games take a long time to develop, so it’s possible that titles we’re just seeing now were set in motion by that film’s release. (Zootopia also got namechecked insome reviewsof Tails Noir at launch).
But I think the more likely scenario is that game developers want to make games about detectives, but don’t feel comfortable making games about police. Frog Detective, for example, uses the words “detective” and “cop” but exists in a world where there is no prison.Spoiler alert for Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County, but at the climax of that game, Frog gets framed for stealing everyone’s hats and is sent to jail, which we find out is a completely new creation. The carceral state doesn’t exist in this world and when it’s introduced it’s presented as a sadistic idea. Despite the title, it’s an anti-police game.
Changing Attitudes Toward The Real Police
Game developers, like the rest of the world, have increasingly had to wrestle with the role of police in society since the Black Lives Matter movement formed in 2013 and came to greater prominence in the wake of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Cute cop stuff still made it into games after that (Spider-Copcomes to mind), but after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the wave of protests it catalyzed, few developers put cop heroes in their games without some sort of additional context or lampshading.
Spider-Man 2completelydid away with Peter’s Spider-Cop bit, and Peter worked with the cops far less.
The problem is, players still love the mechanics that detective games enable. We love looking for clues, assembling a case, and using deductive reasoning to solve a mystery. A studio could always make its game’s hero a P.I. instead of a police officer, but P.I.s often end up handing their suspects over to the police anyway, so how much of a difference does it make? Game protagonists don’t have to be presented as perfect or good people, so there’s nothing wrong with making a game starring a cop. Despite being huge in progressive circles,Disco Elysiumdoesn’t get criticized for its cop protagonist because no one would mistake Harrier Du Bois for a paragon of virtue. He’s supposed to suck.
But having an anti-hero dirty cop protagonist isn’t especially cozy, and ultimately, that’s my theory for what’s driving this. Developers want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want cop mechanics with light, fun vibes. Casting animals as the cops short circuits the criticism before it can start. This is a game about a chicken cop. Why are you taking it so seriously?
