TOY BOX

Holy... I don't know what to say after playing this. The story and gameplay is short, but it's incredibly impactful. I will refrain from saying anything else as I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but few games have made me feel on the same level this one has without me spending hours getting attached to the characters within. Please heed the trigger warnings and don't force yourself to play if it will hurt you, but if not, it's an amazing game with three different endings and cuts deeper than many games these days can. <3

Creepy and disturbing

A short but wonderfully strange and creative piece of interactive fiction that does a lot of things that I didn’t ever think Renpy was capable of! (Renpy is a great engine, and it really can do a lot but Toy Box really blew my mind with how it made use of Renpy!) I really enjoyed talking with the five [spoiler]people[/spoiler] toys, as well as slowly learning more about the inspector and the toy maker. Only issue I have is that the [spoiler]MARTYRIZED[/spoiler] ending can take multiple attempts and/or a bit of waiting to get so it can be a bit frustrating. Though it still won’t take too long so I still recommend it! 7/10

would've been a cute horror game if it didn't rely on negative stereotyping for one of the characters, and didn't make the mysterious they/them main villain the closest we get to having any trans characters in the game. [spoiler]the third "toy" you encounter is a caricature of a sexually violent kinkster who masochistically sexually harasses the inspector and cynically uses terms like "kinkshaming" and "safe space" to deflect from his violations of others' consent. of course some people like this exist in real life, but when there aren't any other characters who express kink in consensual ways or sexually harm others in normative ways to balance things out, it just perpetuates the stereotype that sexual deviance is intrinsically linked to sexual violence.[/spoiler]

TOY BOX is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This garbage E-book is a bit like a pop-up book meets a CYOA... you plod through a dark and awfully written story about unwanted toys... or don't. Wait until you see the peak reader count for this... this was a book nobody wanted. Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage. Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book. One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the e-book peaked at only 5 concurrent readers... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. The funny thing is, if you wanted to print this book, you'd only need to print 5 copies to satsify the entire world's demand for it. While this E-book is "free", you can get better quality, professionally written books and comics for free online (from places like Project Gutenberg) or from public libraries. Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.

A lovely little horror game where you are absolutely not some sort of angelic soul-sorter sifting through the good and the bad of the dead, condemning them to either Heaven or Hell, and where God is absolutely not an overbearing perfectionist that cannot grasp that rules are made to be bent, and not all expressions of hate are equal. Loved all of the characters and the symbolism ingrained in each. Was not expecting a guy with a foot fetish to show up. A jack-in-the-box crank out of ten.

This is a good quick game for the low price of free. It has a bit of an odd mechanic where there is an invisible timer, and said timer doesn't appear to work if you're a fast reader and have finished the dialogue, which made me lose interest in one of the possible ending types. The two I got were pretty cool, and the stories of the toys were compelling and painted very clear pictures of their characters for how brief the interactions were.