Roguelike Report Card: ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove

I wasn’t allowed to own a video game console when I was a kid. Of course I’d go to friends houses and play the classics: Mario and his various Parties and Karts, Sonic, sports games, and Goldeneye. But for most of my childhood the closest I got to console gaming was looking at the boxes in my local library that were positioned just before the checkout line. I was especially taken by Sega’s lineup of games which, in my young mind, had the prettiest graphics. I remember being dazzled by art for The Lion King and impressed with the sharpness of Earthworm Jim. Back in the early and mid 90s, before video games entered a period where video game artists painted primarily with various shades of gray and brown, games were advertised with bright and vibrant color palettes. And for my younger self, no game looked quite as bright and vibrant as Toejam & Earl.

The box art in question

Of course, I had no idea what kind of game Toejam & Earl was, all I knew was what I could glean from the box. I likely would have been looking at ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkatron as that game came out in 1993, which is closer to when I would have been visiting the library and wandering around on my own. The box art portrays two brightly colored aliens running across a sci-fi planet, swimming underwater, and flying through space. I had no concept of what type of game it was, to me it just looked really fucking cool.

Fast-forward through a lifetime of gaming and Toejam & Earl was nothing but a distant memory until I stumbled upon an Angry Video Game Nerd video where he and a friend played the original game in the Toejam & Earl series, Toejam & Earl. The memories of those brightly colored boxes came rushing back and I recognized that this was an opportunity to live vicariously and enjoy a game that I only ever dreamed of when I was a kid. This was a different game from the one I saw as a kid, but that hardly mattered, it was still a chance to relive a childhood memory. But as I watched them play the game, I started to recognize some familiar patterns in the gameplay and asked myself: is this a roguelike?

I needed to play the game myself to investigate, but how could I? This was a game for the Sega Genesis released in 1991, and I don’t have the game, a Genesis, or even a TV that would work with a Genesis to play it on. I took to the internet to see if I could find it on Steam or even some random website that lets you play in your browser (that used to be a thing, I don’t know if it still is). And while I didn’t find a way to play the original, I found something just as good: ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove, a remastered version of the original game.

Brand new polish, same great flavor

ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove was a project headed by the designer of the original ToeJam & Earl, Greg Johnson. The game was funded by KickStarter and developed by a team of three including Johnson, an artist, and an engineer. The game very closely resembles its predecessor, but with updated graphics, tighter controls, and a certain awareness that it is almost impossible to play this game without viewing it through the lens of nostalgia.

The premise of the game is that two aliens, ToeJam and Earl, accidentally created a black hole near Earth while trying to impress their girlfriends. The consequence is that their ship is destroyed and the pieces scattered across a maze-like tier cake of planet Earth, occupied by a variety of different Earthlings that will either help or harm the player characters. ToeJam and Earl are able to discover and use presents to aid them in their quest, and the presents range from ways to attack bad Earthlings to mobility-increasing items like rocket skates to health power-ups. However, sometimes you get a bad present like one that alerts all the Earthlings to your location or lights you on fire. In addition to collecting presents, you can improve your stats by leveling up which is accomplished through finding and using presents, exploring the map, and defeating bad Earthlings. There are no bosses in this game, though the difficulty does increase as you climb to higher levels. The only win condition is to find all 10 ship pieces.

Failure is Inevitable: B- (5)

Failure is certainly inevitable in TJ&E, largely because of a lack of options for avoiding damage and the randomness that comes with the game’s present system. The present system is likely to be a player’s main source of failure because most presents have an unknown item in them before you use them, meaning you may not know if the present that you’re opening is going to do anything to help you out of your current situation, do nothing at all, or make things worse. This becomes especially prevalent at later points in the game, as you’ve likely already used identified presents because you were able to better identify a time when it was appropriate to use them.

Where this game earns points in this category is in the scaling difficulty of enemies. The higher you climb in this game, the tougher the Bad Earthlings become. Early-stage baddies will briefly give chase or attempt to hit you with easily dodged projectiles, but late-stage baddies will chase you seemingly forever or hit you with projectiles that will mess up the controls to the game. Players must learn to prepare for and make adjustments to these tougher enemies as they progress through the game.

Where this game loses points is that it’s almost impossible to adequately prepare for anything due to the randomness of the presents. The later you get in the game, the harder it is to come by presents because of the presence of more relentless enemies, so you will likely be relying on unidentified presents that you have been holding onto out of fear that they might be unhelpful if not harmful. At this point, it’s a dice roll on whether or not you’ll be able to pull something that helps you out of the situation you’re in.

Rewards Experimentation: C- (2)

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that ToeJam & Earl punishes experimentation. The only real space there is for experimentation is choosing what situations to use presents in and which presents to use. As I mentioned before (and will likely mention many more times in this report), the randomness of present use frequently punishes players for taking a gamble on using an unknown item in a potentially crucial situation. And the sword cuts both ways on this: players who more liberally use presents will almost certainly find themselves wasting a highly desirable present in a non-emergency situation, depleting what could have been a lifesaver. 

The present select screen

Besides choosing which presents to use in various situations, there is really no room for experimentation in this game. There are a variety of different characters you can play as, but they all play identically, the only difference being a few different starting presents and stats, which will make very little difference in the long run.

Requires Variation in Playstyle: D (0)

To earn a zero in a category the concept has to be completely absent from the game. Sadly, ToeJam & Earl does not require players to vary their playstyle in the slightest. While the stage layouts, item placement, and enemy generation is random, the lack of bosses or variety in power-ups makes each run play identically. Players will need to adjust for the same set of challenges in every playthrough because they will always face the same obstacles and always have access to the same set of tools to overcome them. In this sense, the game fails at one of the core principles of being a roguelike.

Nails the Difficulty Curve: C (3)

The game’s difficulty curve does the bare minimum to be acceptable. The game does get harder as it continues, but the tools at your disposal to deal with the increased difficulty do not scale the same way the challenges do. Looking at a game like Dead Cells, where you get access superior weapons and tools that allow you to deal with stronger enemies, or Balatro, where your deck naturally improves over the course of many rounds as you continually upgrade it, a good roguelike will increase in difficulty but also give players access to the tools needed to deal with it. Toejam & Earl got the increase in difficulty part right, but it forgot to provide players with better tools to deal with it. The only thing I can think of that could count towards that concept is that presents that you have previously identified remain identified for the rest of the game, but there are also items or events that reset the presents so it’s sort of a crapshoot on if you’ll have many identified presents left by the time you get to the harder challenges.

If you run into a relentless enemy like the Mall Cop when you're low on health, you may be cooked.

Stickiness: C+ (4)

Despite being a pretty poor roguelike, the game has a non-negligable amount of stickiness to it. I think part of it, or maybe even most of it, might have more to do with the game’s art direction rather than the game design. The soundtrack is funky in a very 90s cartoonish fashion, and the character design matches. Playing this game will make you crave a pack of Dunkeroos and a Hi-C Ecto Cooler, and for a 90s kid like me, that’s an amazing feeling that you’ve likely been chasing for a couple of decades now.

There’s also a decent thrill in the discovery of new Earthlings and presents when you first start playing this game. The game’s silliness (Earthlings feature an opera singer whose voice murders every other Earthling in sight, Gandhi, a screaming baby in a shopping card, a Wizard in a carrot suit, an evil dentist, and so many more) is delightful, and discovering new enemies, allies, and power-ups is rewarding for the first few playthroughs.

It can get busy on screen, but tell me you're not intrigued by this visual feast!

However, once the novelty wears off, the fact that this game relies so much on random chance will wear the stickiness down. Players may feel motivated to beat the game once, but the replay value is paper thin and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to continue playing beyond getting a quick hit of 90s nostalgia.

Art Design: (3)

The only category where ToeJam & Earl gets full points. I am a huge fan of the visual aesthetic of this game. The art is incredibly crisp and fluidly animated and is a nice blend of 2D and 3D. The colors are among the most vibrant I’ve ever seen in a video game, and all visual information is communicated with crystal clarity. The aliens and Earthlings alike are all clearly drawn with a lot of love in a style not dissimilar from what you’d see in the funny pages. Even the transition screens between levels are bursting with color that will keep your eyes glued to the screen.

Narrative: (1)

The game has a narrative, but it isn’t really integrated into the gameplay in any interesting way. Still, I had to give ToeJam & Earl a point for the delightful video that the game opens up with showing the titular heroes attempting to impress their girlfriends before making the critical mistake of pressing the button labelled, “DO NOT PRESS.”

TJ & Earl aboard the Rapmaster Rocketship, with girlfriends Lewanda and Latisha sitting in the back.

Unique Twist: (0)

At one point, the game itself was probably considered a unique twist in and of itself by just being a roguelike. However, in a modern world packed with roguelikes, this game does nothing to differentiate itself from the crowd other than its 90s nostalgia and intellectual property.

Total: 18 (F Tier)

I could imagine that the original game would have been a daring new creation at a time when games were largely linear and repetitive. While the game’s randomness creates all sorts of headaches in the design, it also means that each run is fresh and unique. But game design has come a long way, and devs have found ways to use randomness to make each run unique while also removing it from the gameplay’s core mechanics in a way that puts more power in the hands of the player and less in the hands of pure luck. As a result, ToeJam & Earl feels like an outdated relic of a game: interesting to observe, but largely obsolete in this day and age.