Toll: The Ferryman's Ledger

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

You drowned upstream, in a river with birds over it. The body was never found, so your eyes went unclosed and your fare went unpaid, and the black water would not take you.

Death offered you the job instead. Carry her dead, keep the coins you find on their eyes, and one day buy your own crossing with them. She decides when you have enough.

That was three thousand years ago. You are still rowing.

The dead have things to say

147 of them, one per passenger, muttered over the side of the boat on the way across. The hard drive nobody backed up. The seeds in the drawer that never went in the ground. The thing they were finally going to say to Gary. Nobody dies with the list finished.

Some of them ask you to finish it for them. You can promise, knowing you never leave the water, or you can tell them the truth halfway across. Every line you hear goes down in your ledger, along with everything Death has said to you.

What is not in here

• No ads, no microtransactions, no energy bar, no timer you can pay to skip.

• No account to make and no server to talk to. It is a file on your disk and it runs with the internet switched off.

• No infinite prestige loop dressed up as content. There is a last purchase, and after it the game is over.

It ends

TOLL takes about three hours. At the end there is a last purchase, a last crossing, one more thing Death has to say to you, and the credits. You can go round again if you want the rivers back. Nothing in the game will pester you to.

Five rivers, five rules

• Styx. Souls, oars, and the first skeleton who rows so you don't have to.

• Acheron. Grief has weight here, and that is not a figure of speech. The heavy dead pay more and sail slower.

• Lethe. The dead forget they are dead and wander off the side of the boat.

• Phlegethon. The river is on fire. Shortly, so is your hull.

• Cocytus. Ice closes on the boat while you row, and this is where your price gets named.

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 stops you halfway across to ask about the life you had. A promise you broke. Whose grief was heaviest to carry. Who you would take first if the boat only held one.

The crossing waits while you answer. Answer well and that river pays you better for the rest of the game, tributes included. Be short with it and it remembers that too. Lethe forgets what you told her and asks again.

Set your own price

• Charge merciful, fair or greedy. Cheap brings a crowd that pays badly, steep thins out the shore and pays for it, and the right answer depends on whether the queue is longer than your boat.

• Omens blow through the underworld: mist, ashfall, still water, a pale light over the Cocytus. Each bends the rules of its river for a while and sets you a job while it lasts, and finishing the job pays on every fare until the next tribute.

• Some of the dead are worth five ordinary fares. Some come marked, and taking one aboard costs you later. Both wait off to the side of the queue, and no skeleton will pick them up for you.

• Now and then somebody on the far bank wants to go back to the living. The fare is enormous. The shore works out that your boat goes both ways, and stops coming down to it for a while.

• And Death walks the pier with something to sell: a shorter crossing, a fuller shore, a quarter of an hour where nothing burns. She prices it in crossings rather than coin, and she does not haggle.

Pay the tribute

Hades takes the run off you, all of it, and pays in shadows. Shadows buy relics that outlast the reset, so the next run starts further along than the last. The first time he barely looks up from his book. By the sixth tribute he would like to know what a boatman could possibly be saving up for, and he is not asking idly.

Row, or don't

Click the water and the crossing goes quicker; hold the button and you row at about the pace of a living man. Or buy skeletons, let them load the boat and cast off without you, and read the ledger while they work. Close the game and the underworld carries on, but nobody rows unwatched: the crew sits down on the shore, and on your return you are told to the coin what they did not earn.

And some of it wants your hands and nothing else. Death upends her purse across your deck and gives you thirty seconds to get it off the boards. The Lethe floats up the faces of people you have ferried, two of each, and asks you to put the names back together.