Initially released last year, Frogatto & Friends was hailed as a quiet triumph of open-source development. A splinter project by several of the people behind open-source strategy-RPG behemoth The Battle For Wesnoth, Frogatto offers beautiful Amiga-esque pixel art, lovely music and a whole lot of classic platforming action to get through. Even in it’s original state, it was well worth a download.

As of last week, it’s even more deserving of your attention, due to the release of version 1.1, the culmination of months of small improvements and patches. Currently available in Windows, Mac, Linux formats as freeware, and purchasable on iOS (and optionally via the Mac app store, if you want to donate via official channels), Frogatto has grown and refined a lot since the initial version, with tighter gameplay, polished graphics, a series of new quickfire arcade-style play modes, an achievement system and further improvements to the (already full-featured) level editor included.

A classic 16-bit style platformer with some light open-world exploration elements, Frogatto is the story of the titular frog-thing, and his quest to find meaningful employment, defeat an army of piratical cats and mooch goodies off his friends as he climbs and jumps through a fairly lengthy and varied series of environments. Controls are absolutely dead simple, with just four directions, a jump button and an action button making it playable entirely with even a NES pad (or via virtual touchscreen controls, as the iOS version proves). It’s not without depth and subtlety, though. There’s a surprising number of moves you can pull off with just inputs, and plenty of challenging situations to put your skills to the test in.

It’s a fun and free way to lose a couple of afternoons, and well worth the download. The current build of the game weighs in at a fairly hefty 150mb, but you get a lot of content and a full editing suite on top of it. Hop to it, and give it a try.