So here’s a little behind-the-scenes tidbit – rather than sit at my desk like I normally would, I’m writing this review on my phone, laid on my couch. Not because I’d prefer to be here over my desk and typing this out on an actual keyboard, but because this is the only position I can comfortably write in without my arms being in agony. And why are my arms in agony? Because I just spent the better part of four hours using them to throw myself through the air over and over, and over. And over.
I have to dig pretty far back in my memory for a time I felt this sore after a VR session, maybe not since the iconic Beat Saber first landed on the scene and I wound up immensely addicted. It’s not even to say that Toss! is particularly brutal on the ol’ arms – although it definitely can be – but more a result of how quickly I fell into its “one more go” trap and put myself in the prison of muscular fatigue that I find myself in now.
Toss! is incredibly simple in premise. You’re a monkey, or at least the disembodied head and hands of one, and your goal is to clear a series of gymnastic courses in the clouds to repair your crashed starship. At least that’s as far as I could infer from the wordless story, monkeys are known to crash-land into weird cloud worlds and race through jungle gyms so that a robot will gradually gift them starship repair parts, right?
So the gist is you’ve got 80-ish levels to complete in order across nine semi-distinct “worlds,” with each level being a playground-esque series of beams and obstacles to throw yourself across to reach a finish line. And when I say throw, I mean it – this game is called Toss! for a reason. Your only means of forward momentum here is using your floating monkey hands to grip onto whatever’s in front of you and literally fling yourself through the air to catch onto the next bit of scenery and so on. At a base level it almost feels like you’re one of the hapless animals in a physics-based iPhone arcade game circa 2010, just with more potential for air sickness.
Where nuance comes in is a set of three different objectives in each level – picking up every floating banana piece, finishing the level in a certain time, and completing the course with as few “grabs” onto the available handholds as possible. Every level is set up in such a way that all three goals generally offer up a unique path and approach to the goal, which affords a great amount of replayability to these otherwise-quickfire stages. Some of the objectives, especially the time-based ones, can also be brutally challenging which lends the game that one-more-go vibe that’s destroyed any chances of me using my arms for the rest of the week. It’s the feeling of physically smacking the big green button at the goal after a particularly well-executed run that really cinches it for me.
The challenge isn’t always welcome or earned though, with Toss! exhibiting some truly odd logic at times when it comes to how it handles physics and momentum. It’s a simple, arcade-y game and not a high-tech sim, so I didn’t go in expecting a 1:1 parkour experience, but there are only so many times I can find myself being flung backwards through the air at impossible speeds or grab onto the inside of a solid wall before it becomes a frustration. After playing for a couple of hours I found I’d gotten used to the game’s quirks, but having such unpredictable interactions with the physical environment in a VR game, simple or not, can really confound the experience.
Toss! does a good job of gradually introducing new concepts and level elements as you work your way through each new world though, so you’ll pretty quickly forget any of the more aggravating courses as you keep moving forward. The stages are short, but between the optional objectives and new cuffs and modifiers to unlock you’ll get a fair amount out of it. There are leaderboards to compete on as well, though in a pre-release state I didn’t really get to see how I fared against the rest of the world (let’s face it, it probably wouldn’t have been great).
