Toll Booth Simulator Review (PC)

First impressions of Toll Booth Simulator led me to believe that I had mistakenly rolled into yet another dull iteration of Papers, Please. After twenty minutes, however, that impression soon became warped — to the point where I had little idea of what I was doing, or even where I was. At first I assumed that the game would consist of repeating the same boring process of checking passports, accruing cash, and stamping travel documents. But then, the farming came into the equation. After that, the mixology and the cocktail brewing process began to take shape. It was sometime after that, unsurprisingly, that I figured out what Toll Booth Simulator was. Oh, it wasn’t about operating a toll booth; it was about fabricating the law and forging an empire out of questionable appetizers.

It started out with a simple idea: a degenerate, who was given the opportunity to repay a debt to society by working at a toll booth in the middle of nowhere, would roll up to work each morning, analyze papers, and accept small change before allowing access to the other side of a barrier. That was the easy part. But, after the first fifteen minutes, things started to get a little, I don’t know, strange. Before long that same old degenerate could lean into old habits and become a menace to humanity. The toll booth was still there, but there were other things that could divide their time, like breaking into homes and stealing precious items, for example. And when that wasn’t happening, they would plant their crops, grow unusual products, and begin selling cocktails to strangers to make a few extra bucks on the side.

Toll Booth Simulator is, for lack of a better word, odd. It’s odd because, rather than serving as a transparent chore core sim with textbook checklists, it chooses to focus on peculiar pastimes that are mere extensions to an otherwise ordinary job. The general idea behind the game is to grant access to travelers—a task that requires you to comb over passports, take cash, and decide whether or not to allow them to enter. But, on the side of all of this, it’s about building a criminal empire from beneath the shadow of the law. Clearly, as the former convict in this world, honest work is a fickle mirage. But crime, on the other hand, always pays. Or at least, it does until the sirens blare and the police arrive at your doorstep.

While there is a bit of Papers, Please etched into the gameplay here, Toll Booth Simulator makes a habit of veering towards its own quirks and challenges. Take the farming and mixology, for example. If you’re not glossing over details and operating the barrier, then you’re applying for new crops, peppering allotments with unusual seeds, or brewing cocktails with weird ingredients to sell to your “customers” in a bid to make ends meet and repay an ever-escalating debt. The toll booth job certainly pays, but not quite enough to prevent you from falling into financial ruin, hence the criminal enterprises.

The game itself is broken up into several parts, with one of the sections being entirely observation-based and reliant on your decision making skills, and the other being more agricultural and mixology-based, which mainly consists of interacting with appliances to create cocktails and expand your range of flavors. Frankly, none of these things require a lot of effort to solve, given that most of the game mechanics solely rely on tapping buttons to operate machinery, as well as transporting item A to socket B to fertilize, mix, and essentially incubate beverages and other items for your own seemingly noble purposes. Think standard chore core business sim, and you should have a vague idea of how it all works. You stack, stir, and mix — and then do it all again to earn enough cash to fund additional shady pastimes, like burglary, naturally.

To make it painfully clear, Toll Booth Simulator isn’t an airtight experience, in that it doesn’t operate like the well-oiled machine that you need and want it to act as. To call it a little shoddy might be a little unfair. But, it is worth pointing out that, visually, it’s about as silly and as minimalistic as it gets. The world itself doesn’t have a huge amount to offer outside of its toll booth and surrounding farmyard-like regions, nor does it boast the glitzy components of a striking locale with copious amounts of hidden secrets and fine details. Moreover, it doesn’t do a lot to reinvent the wheel by introducing anything particularly special to the mix, either. That said, it does offer a solid variety of things to do, with various cocktails, crops, and other oddball tasks to keep your hands busy. The question is, is all of this worth the price of admission?

Verdict

Toll Booth Simulator minces monotony with mixology in a two-of-a-kind cocktail of criminal enterprises and toll-haggling exercises, with a variety of ingredients that wax the best of unorthodox flavors and a simple yet satisfying observation-based experience that puts the likes of Papers, Please in its place for the short time it hovers around the barrier. Does it do anything with utmost perfection? Not at all, no. And yet, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that, as far as oddball chore sims go, Toll Booth makes for one of the oddest of ‘em all. You can take that with a grain of salt.

While it’s no secret that Toll Booth Simulator has its own collection of imperfections and loose teeth, I can safely say that it is a game that you’ll more than likely remember for weeks to come. It might not be the best thing to ever kiss the tip of the asphalt, but I’ll bite. Heck, if it’s a two-for-one deal that touches both the art of choice-driven gameplay and mixology, then you might just find yourself spoilt for choice here. Though, to be fair, you might struggle to find anything that sits in the same allotment as this.