Games Like Toll

The river takes no payment in lives. Only in coin.

You drowned. Nobody found the body, nobody closed your eyes, and nobody laid the coin that pays for the crossing. So you made a bargain with Death: carry her dead, take the coin from their eyes, and one day buy your own passage. One coin buys a crossing. One that is yours. Not given. Not taken from the dead. Earned. Death will tell you when you have earned enough.

It ends

Most incrementals go on forever, because forever is easier to build than an ending. TOLL is about three hours long and it finishes: there is a last purchase, a last crossing, and a last thing said to you. You can start again if you want to. You do not have to.

Five rivers, five rules

The rivers talk back

Every river has a spirit who watches you work: Styx the Oath, Acheron the Woe, Lethe the Forgetting, Tisiphone the Avenger, Kokytos the Wailing. Every few minutes one of them asks you something about the life you had — a promise you broke, a thing you never finished, who you would carry first. Nothing pauses while you answer. Answer well and the river pays you better; ignore it and it doesn't. Lethe forgets your answer and asks again.

Set your own price

The dead have things to say

A hundred and forty-seven of them, muttered over the side of the boat on the way across. Nobody dies with the list finished. Some of it is funny. All of it is written down in a ledger you keep — along with everything Death has ever said to you.

Pay the tribute

Hades takes everything you have earned and gives you shadows for it. Shadows buy relics that outlive the reset. He has an opinion about you, and it changes.

Row, or don't

Click the water and the crossing goes faster; hold it and you row like a living man. Or buy skeletons and let them do it while you read the ledger. Both are the same game — offline progress is the same ticks running while you are away, not a separate formula. Close it. It keeps rowing.

What is not in here