Toads of the Bayou is the latest game in a genre that is starting to feel the bloat. Rogue-like deck-builders have really blown up over the last couple of years with spectacular offerings like Slay The Spire, Inscryption, and this year’s Balatro. But that popularity caused an inevitable wave of middling entries, flooding the genre.
La Grange’s Toads of the Bayou is one of those games. A bite-sized palate cleanser, that bites off more than it can chew.
You Activated My Toad Card!
Toads of the Bayou is a deck-building strategy game where you battle possessed creatures in a swamp to save the islands for your toady brethren. At its core, it’s a collection of small tactical puzzles that lead to a boss fight, wrapped up in a roguelike formula. Between runs, you’ll upgrade your home base and add new cards to your deck to make subsequent runs easier.
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When starting a new run, you’ll choose from one of three toads (once you unlock them all), each with their own special ability, and unique cards specific to them. The first is The Leader, a toad gussied up as if he were heading to the French Revolution. Suitably, his abilities are built around pistol and sabre combat.
The structure is basically the same each run — you’ll choose your toad and set out into the islands to challenge the forces of Baron Samedi. Each level will have a core objective and sub-objective, and each island will have ten to fifteen maps to complete before unlocking the boss.
If you fail a sub-objective you’ll receive a negative card in your draw pile for the remainder of the run and making future objectives harder to complete. This can easily snowball out of control and makes it incredibly hard to seize back control of the run.
Who’s the Boss?
The difficulty of bosses spikes massively from standard enemies. The first one I came up against was a giant tree that would attack the majority of the squares on the board each round. To beat it, you need to draw a specific combo of cards to get in, deal damage, and escape in time.
Making things tougher, there were also smaller enemies spread around the board, which were immune to damage from your allies — a quirk that was only present in this specific boss fight.
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Getting Down and Dirty in the Swamp
The big baddie causing chaos for the titular Toads of the Bayou is Baron Samedi, the Loa of Haitian Vodou. Baron Samedi is depicted as a giant anthropomorphic toad, with glowing eyes and decked out in purple livery and tattoos. You can see his influence in the enemies you fight, as they all seem proud of their purple glowing eyes and evil toad powers.
Each map you jump into is randomly generated, and you’ll face more deadly enemies with more sub-objectives to balance as you progress; positioning is vital to your success. If you have ever played Into the Breach, this structure should be immediately familiar.
Enemies spawn between turns and plan their attacks — indicated by little red squares on the map — you can then use cards to push them around the board and avoid their blows. You can follow up with your own attacks or move yourself out of harm’s way, causing enemies to attack thin air. You can even push your foes into one another or into the attack range of their allies.
These tactical considerations around combat make missions surprisingly dynamic; you’ll always have plenty of targets and complications as you work towards the mission of that level.
Ups and Downs, Like a Jumping Toad
The visuals of Toads of the Bayou are where it really shines. The dank and dreary world of the Bayou is punctuated by pops of colour and the glow of corrupted enemies. The characters all look straight out of an early Disney animation and are incredibly expressive for simple sprites.
Likewise, the soundtrack leans into the theme in a big way, with a combination of mosquito hums, banjo twangs, and rumbling jazz playing across every level. But once you start doing run after run, making tiny steps forwards, the novelty starts to wear off.
Between rounds you’ll find yourself back at the tavern. It’s here you can purchase new cards to add to the deck, presenting new ways of dealing with enemies. I found the most useful cards were ones that changed the battlefield by pushing or pulling enemies around.
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Along the way, you’ll also get support toads to help you in battle, triggering various effects as you fight. One such toad had an ability that let you discard a card and draw another every six kills — which became very useful!
Should you buy Toads of the Bayou?
Toads of the Bayou is a bite-sized game that had me in its teeth for my first session, but soon, the repetition and lack of variety to the gameplay wore me down.
While it has a striking visual style and a solid soundtrack, it doesn’t do enough to make itself stand out in the crowded rogue-like deck-builder market.
Quest Daily scores Toads of the Bayou:
6/10
Toads of the Bayou is out on now on PC via Steam.
A copy of Toads of the Bayou was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review
