The Bridge Tolls For Me

Fun fact: The Bridge Tolls For Me’s executable name is actually “The Bridge Tolls for Thee (or something)”. This is clearly reflective of its past as a short contest game, when the name was obviously one of the developer’s lesser concerns. As it happens, it’s their second game made for said contest (Insanity Game Jam Idea Generator): the first, Farm Life 2040, didn’t get the best reception here due to the diverse roster of game-breaking bugs. This one seems to have improved somewhat since then.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



Pure MV RTP used for all the graphics and sounds here! The result generally looks and sounds quite nice. What seems like incongruous at first (wooden direction sign on an asphalt street, bridge control stations that are far larger on the inside and full of empty space) are soon overshadowed by the increasingly creative (or increasingly labored, depending on your perspective) use of graphical assets to enable the gameplay, which is also the reason for the large indoor maps.

Gameplay



The game is largely a collection of mildly entertaining puzzles and minigames, somewhat bound together by the chaotic story. Block puzzles like the one above (where misdelivered plants make up the obstacles that need to be strategically pushed through) are most prominent, since there are two more in the game; an earlier one that simply asks you to push a green box onto a green button, and one where the angel statues need to stand on the right pressure plates while facing each other, and pushed past several pairs of irrelevant statues in their way. All of them can be reset by exiting the room, and re-entering it, though this is bugged for the last puzzle:



And I don't just mean the passability bug. The way extra mustachioed friend (named Yo-Yo Mahm) is spawned near the entrance and you can't re-enter the whole place is more important.

Other things to do include entering a directional code into the keypad off the large glowing buttons on the floor to turn the lights on, a navigational/jumping puzzle, and a driving minigame. Here, it’s better then in, say, A Blurred Line, because the speed is not insane and you have decent chance of avoiding the incoming cars. However, it still makes the mistake of centering the camera on your car, thus meaning half the screen is taken up by the irrelevant space behind you, leaving less to see the incoming traffic. The whole thing also goes on without changing in any way for 3 whole screens. There are also weird collision detection bugs, where it’s generally possible to clip through the oncoming cars’ bumpers while changing lanes, and a crash only occurs when two cars have more-or-less fully driven into each other. Sometimes, though, even that doesn’t happen:



However, it is followed by a pretty cool minigame where getting through the traffic jam on foot is effectively turned into an equivalent of a maze.



Storyline



So, how do our characters, named Sammy and Yo-Yo Mahm, even get caught up in all the disruption above? It starts from a simple everyday desire of wanting to be present at yet another fast food outlet’s grand opening, which gets disrupted by the sudden appearance of toll booths on a previously free bridge. The intrepid Sammy decides she has to get involved in righting this wrong, and against the patient instincts of , and so they go through all the challenges above, even abandoning their car at the start, and stealing someone else’s to get through the traffic minigame. Of course, you get a few silly snippets of information on the way, but nothing substantial until you get to the ending. That ending is not dramatic in any way. It hardly provides a satisfying conclusion. A large part of it is in fact pure polemic. It is also unconventional as far games in general go, and is 100% accurate and realistic.

Typos for the creator:

Conclusion

So, this is The Bridge Tolls For Me/Thee (or something). A very light game that’s mainly composed of decent but throwaway puzzles, and which somewhat suddenly goes from pure silliness to making a clear, if unappealing, point. It’s up to you whether you also want to spend 10-15 minutes on it. I suppose I can now only wait for the next Insanity Game Jam Idea Generator, to see what philteredkhaos might achieve while taking a third crack at it.