ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove (PS4)

Back before console gaming embraced digital distribution and indie publishing, most games that got released stuck to popular genres in what seemed like safe bets. There was definitely experimentation and evolution, but something niche like a rogue-like was a rare find, and when the original ToeJam & Earl game hit the Sega Genesis, it quickly found a cult following for its humor, hip hop styling, and rare genre gameplay. While it would go on to have two more games produced, the series was perhaps too niche for its own good, ToeJam & Earl going quiet for almost 15 years. In 2015 though, series creator Greg Johnson created a Kickstarter campaign to get a new title in the series off the ground, and with nostalgic fans backing it, ToeJam & Earl returned to the gaming world in 2019. Nearly 30 years after the first game in the series, the gaming landscape had changed, with rogue-likes in vogue, indie developers constantly exploring strange styles and ideas, and niche genres just a small search away. ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove wasn’t as unique as it used to be, and in some ways, what was once funky fresh now felt dated and passé.

There is an undeniable sense of style to the game still, the aliens from the planet Funkotron and the aesthetic they brought with them perhaps the game’s biggest strength. The adventure begins because of a failed attempt to impress a girl by ToeJam, a three-legged red alien with a backwards cap, gold chains, and high-top sneakers. Earl, a rotund yellow alien wearing shorts and shades but no shirt to speak of, is put in charge of a spaceship the duo have on loan, flying it to Earth so they can impress two alien girls named Lewanda and Latisha, both girls of course keeping to theme with alien dreads and appropriate dress. However, when ToeJam wants to belt out some beats, Earl presses the wrong button by mistake, causing a black hole to suck up the ship and planet Earth, spitting everything back out in mixed up floating islands the aliens will have to traverse to get back the ship’s parts and return home to Funkotron.

Players can pick from any of the four characters to play as, potentially unlocking more after their adventure or choosing to wear the retro costumes for the two headlining aliens. These days though, all of the characters have a retro cool look to them, their dress coming straight out of the 80s and 90s and other elements of the game like the funky music definitely trying to evoke that time period as well. The characters aren’t just cool designs though, each one having special abilities and stats that will influence what tasks they can perform while hunting down ship parts. Earl, for example, can eat rotten food to heal up, and Lewanda is able to freely use the strange parking meters that pop up and have unusual effects. Co-op will allow two players to go on the adventure together, although the game rarely requires you to interact with your partner much. You can assist them with certain items and you both need to get on elevators together to head up to the next layer of the strange floating pieces of Earth, but you can kind of just wander off and do your own thing for the most part… or at least you could have if the game wasn’t so openly hostile.

ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove packs each level with Earthlings who react to the sight of aliens strangely, in that most decide to charge towards the player characters with the intent to kill. Whether it’s a man with a lawnmower, an ice cream truck, a woman with her child in a shopping cart, or men from the Spanish Inquisition, all of them will want you gone as soon as they spot you. Some just ram into you to do damage, but the Inquisitor will send you down to a lower level if he catches you, the hula girl will force you to dance with her and leave you open to other attacks, and the chicken soldiers with a mortar will easily fire upon you from afar. Seeing what strange forms these enemies take is appealing at first, ghost cows and mailbox mimics funny the first time you see them, but almost every enemy is persistent and incredibly fast. If you can’t shake them quickly, they’ll easily be able to catch up and damage you, some like the often invisible boogeyman hitting you so far you might fall off the level and end up in an earlier one again. Some humans will help you like the Sage in a carrot suit who lets you level up and the Gandhi look alike who creates an aura of peace to keep enemies away, but for the most part you need to flee and find some flowers to hide in or else you will be pursued doggedly. Later levels definitely become less appealing as new enemy types stop appearing and the game just starts recoloring them, and having to do things like repeatedly dive into water and hoping enemies will back off will start to dominate your play style. Some enemies can be outmaneuvered, but others like the hula girl might ensnare you before you even see them, so engaging with the abundant angry Earthlings quickly grows frustrating despite them almost being funny due to their character designs.

You do sometimes have some items that can help you overcome the aggression of the humans. Presents are scattered all around the game world, usually requiring you to shake parts of the environment to knock them loose, but they can be taken from Santa or his elves, revealed with things like the parking meters, and can otherwise turn up in unusual ways. The presents can have a wide variety of effects such as giving you tomatoes you can hurl at Earthlings for a brief time, sneakers that speed up your run, healing items, and other little boons like a free level up. However, these can also be harmful, such as having a sign appear over your head beckoning all the enemies in the area to come get you, making a thundercloud constantly zap you, or teleport you to an island where the only way off is to jump down to an earlier level. There are silly ones like making your character stop to burp repeatedly and incredibly helpful ones like wings that let you fly around for a while, but many presents are complete mysteries when picked up. You can use one and just hope it is beneficial, but the many bad ones make this a risky prospect. Some presents are even broken, meaning they have a chance to backfire, and others are supercharged, meaning they will execute an even stronger version of what is usually their benefit or detriment. Using presents is the easiest way to earn experience points for leveling up to earn new stat boosts, but while the experimentation aspect is fun at first, a winning run, even on lower difficulties, means the risk isn’t often worth taking. You might just crack open a present that sets you on fire and kills you, and while the Sage can identify them for you and the repairmen can fix broken ones, they do require money to do so.

Earning cash can be done in a few ways such as finding it around the level like the presents and healing food items, but there are also dancing minigames you can find where you play a small rhythm game where you need to match the button prompts. Sometimes you’ll be called to make your own custom dance and then repeat it, but these are a bit too simple to be fun and are thus pretty much just the most reliable money earning method instead of an exciting new gameplay angle. Sometimes you can hop into another dimension called the HyperFunk Zone to play an automatic runner to grab experience and money and you can gamble with the Dungeons and Dragons nerds to potentially earn more cash, but it’s doled out slowly and is another part of the game that seems harder to engage with then it should be. Low cash hauls means it’s not feasible to identify many of your presents and the risk in using them is often great, so when you factor in the incredible aggression of your opposition, you come down to the sad truth of ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove: the best way to play is to ignore most of the interesting designs and mechanics.

A mad dash to find the elevator in every level save for the ones where you need to find the spaceship parts is the safest path to success. Coupled with things like permadeath resetting the whole adventure if you run out of lives and the randomized harder difficulties meaning you can’t memorize the path to the elevators, playing safe and boring emerges as the smartest course of action, and so much of that effort that went into the character of the game world is wasted as your goal becomes to avoid as much of it as possible. Indulging your curiosity too often leads to trouble and resets, so while it is fun to see what a new enemy does or what comes out of a present, you learn that the optimal route is the lamest route.

THE VERDICT: ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is exploding with retro style, full of fun art design, and packs in plenty of presents and strange enemy types that make it exciting to see what the game might cook up next… that is, until you feel the gameplay ramifications of engaging with pretty much any potentially interesting part of the design. Enemies are incredibly capable and aggressive, your options for overcoming them mostly just being running away and hoping they won’t catch up. Presents can have good outcomes, but the bad ones can be so punishing you’re better off barely touching them. And with rogue-like punishments such as permadeath in play, a winning run sadly becomes more about ignoring the game’s appealing quirks just so you can survive the adventure and make it to the end. Simultaneously designed to encourage curiosity and punish it, it’s hard to get in the groove of this rough reboot.

And so, I give ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. The first few times exploring the world of ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove was delightful as my co-op partner and I took in the sights and learned what the presents can do, but the more we engaged with foes, played with presents, and tried to explore, the more the game resisted our inquisitive minds. Runs ended to wanting to see what a present would do or not just fleeing the moment we spotted a new enemy type, and soon it became clear success would be bought not with trying to get the most presents or earning a lot of cash, but instead by dashing to ship parts and scurrying to elevators while hoping the train of enemies doggedly pursuing us wouldn’t send us flying or sap a huge amount of our health. Engaging with the game’s systems simply didn’t reward the commitment, and so, while so much of the game definitely could have been appealing or provided cute little diversions, the best way to play is the worst way when viewed for its fun factor. The personality is lost behind levels overstuffed with annoyances, the game really needing to take a note from Earl and chill on how it presents itself. Toning down the hostility of the world or at least saving that only for the highest difficulties would let you breathe in things better and allow yourself to be a little risky with that broken mystery present in your pack, but instead survival has been made too important to indulge in plenty of mechanics that could have been entertaining if they didn’t interact so poorly with the general design.

ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove is a pseudo-remake of the original but its title is certainly deceptive. Rather than a return to form, this feels like a fumbling attempt to capture some long lost magic, but the sad thing is that is only in regards to the gameplay. The style of the world, silly character designs, and weird indulgences like hopping into the HyperFunk Zone all had potential, but the game gives you little time to appreciate them as it bombards you with aggression and makes experimentation and exploration constantly detrimental. ToeJam & Earl’s new adventure has some heart put into it and it’s nice to seem the back in action, but it certainly doesn’t feel like they’ve got their groove back quite yet.