🎮 春待ちトロイダル (Toroidal: Awaiting the Spring)

Written by Daikon

This article was featured in our 2024 July-August issue. Check out more articles and interviews in the full issue.

For high school students, graduation is a huge event that represents a major turning point in their lives. It marks a time for teenagers to grow into their adult selves, with complicated feelings about taking the next step forward while leaving behind to the life they have known up to that point. And so the time leading up to graduation also feels quite special, charged with a kind of hopeful and melancholic energy. The exams are over, and their future plans are more or less secured. All that's left is to spend these last few days before the end of adolescence.

I remember having complicated feelings of liberation mixed with a strong sense of urgency. My thoughts were full, happiness of being able to graduate with my friends and wistful that our relationships would undoubtedly change once we all entered the workforce. The game I would like to introduce today, Toroidal: Awaiting the Spring by the group SameSameSummation, brought those strange and wistful pre-graduation feelings back to life.

"I am Demon. The one who brought you here was I."

Toroidal is a mystery adventure game with roguelike elements and a deck-building battle system, and is set in a high school ten days before the spring graduation ceremony. The main character is a young man who was captured by a demon and forced into the body of a transfer student at the school, and tasked with unraveling the mysterious incident that happens on graduation day. If he cannot prevent this incident from happening, he will loop back to the start of the ten days. Using the information gleaned from previous runs, the player must tackle this mystery from every angle in order to break out of the loop and prevent tragedy from striking.

(Because this is a mystery game, the remainder of this article may contain mild spoilers. I have limited my discussion of the game to the first two loops.)

You will meet a large cast of colorful and friendly classmates, like Haru the class president.

When our protagonist transfers to this high school, set on a rural island only ten days before graduation, his classmates are warm and welcoming despite his untimely arrival. The player can explore the school and surrounding town and get to know their classmates. Each character has a unique personality and a friendly nickname, so at first, it feels like a typical high school simulator. Every day you can take one action, such as hanging out with your classmates, studying, or working out. These actions cost your character energy, but may improve other stats such as concentration, strength, and your relationships with others.

"No way... there's no way something like this could have happened..."

After spending a pleasant ten days making fond memories with his classmates, the protagonist heads to school for the long-awaited graduation ceremony. But when he arrives, the atmosphere is gloomy and dark. He learns that something terrible has happened to one of his friends, and we finally arrive at the conundrum at the heart of the game. What happened to this classmate? Who could have done this? Could one of your dear friends be capable of terrible things, and who could it be? These are the questions you will need to find the answers for as you are sent back in time to start your second loop.

From the second loop onwards, you can engage other characters in conversational card battles to improve your relationships and get to know more about them.

This is when the game also introduces its card-based dialogue system. There are four colored suits (blue Questions, yellow Gossip, green Small Talk, and pink Romance) that have different number values. When you engage in a conversation with another character, you each play one card at a time over four rounds. In general, the person who plays the higher number wins the cards from that round, although different abilities and skills may apply to complicate matters. If you play cards that are equal in value, the two cards go into a holding area that can be won in the next round. If you win a round where the two cards are of the same suit, you get twice as many points for that round. At the end of four rounds, your points are used to level up your relationship with the other character.

"GOOD!! You had a lively conversation! Feels good!"

You need to be able to read your opponent and guess what card they will play; a grinning smirk might mean they will play their strongest card, while a defeated slump might mean they're about to throw out a low-value card. Both of your hands are open at all times so you need to strategically play your cards to win as many rounds as possible. Just like in real life, a smooth conversation will make a character warm up to you, while an awkward and stilted one will leave them closed off. Since you are trying to get as much information out of these characters as possible, you will want to increase your relationship levels with everyone and get them to trust you with their deepest secrets.

Level up your Topic Discovery score to choose one of three random cards to add to your deck.

From the second loop, your character can do up to six actions per day. It is also here that the other stats start to make more sense. You can study to level up your Topic Discovery and add more cards to your deck, and work out to Improve Speaking Skills in order to level up the cards you already have. At the start of your next loop, you can also spend the points that you earned from previous runs to buy new cards, stat upgrades, and different abilities from the demon. You can choose up to eight cards for your deck, of which four will be randomly chosen at the start of each dialogue battle, so you will want to hone your strong cards and weed out weaker ones, while playing to the strengths of your equipped abilities. The card system is simple and intuitive, but with a ton of depth and customization.

On top of the card battles, there are also many events that pop up over the ten days that allow you to talk with and learn more about the other characters.

Before the protagonist arrived within the tiny and closed environment of this small island school, the characters must have had tight bonds with each other. They must have held great joy and sorrow over the thought of graduating and leaving behind their childhood relationships with one another. The player will also need to repeat this short ten-day period over and over again, building and re-building ever stronger bonds, talking with the other characters and getting closer to the truth. But when all is said and done, the protagonist too will have to say goodbye and leave behind the relationships he built, and graduate on from the events of his time there.

Win card battles to level up your relationships with the other characters.

Toroidal: Awaiting the Spring is highly satisfying, with each element--the sentimentality of graduation, pursuing the truth behind the mystery, and the strategic conversational card battles--a wonderful experience on their own, and even stronger linked together as part of a larger overarching game. It is out now on Steam and consoles. I highly recommend playing this game and reliving those special ten days before graduation.