Buy Toll: The Ferryman's Ledger PC key

Toll: The Ferryman's Ledger is a game about ferrying the dead across the underworld's rivers. You collect fares, hear the passengers' unfinished thoughts and record them in a ledger alongside everything Death says to you. There are 147 passengers, each with something left undone: a hard drive nobody backed up, seeds never planted or words never said to Gary. Some ask you to finish a task for them; you can promise, or tell them the truth before the crossing ends.

The rivers

Five river spirits watch you work: Styx the Oath, Acheron the Woe, Lethe the Forgetting, Tisiphone the Avenger and Kokytos the Wailing. Every few minutes, one interrupts a crossing to ask about your life, such as a promise you broke, whose grief was hardest to carry or who you would take first if the boat held only one. The crossing waits for your answer. Answer well and that river pays better for the rest of the game, including tributes; be short with a spirit and it remembers. Lethe forgets your answers and asks again.

The rivers each have their own rules:

• Styx: Souls, oars and the first skeleton who rows so you do not have to.
• Acheron: Grief has weight. The heavy dead pay more and sail slower.
• Lethe: The dead forget they are dead and wander off the side of the boat.
• Phlegethon: The river is on fire, and your hull will soon be too.
• Cocytus: Ice closes around the boat as you row, and this is where your price is named.

Set the toll

You can set your toll to merciful, fair or greedy. A cheap fare draws a crowd that pays poorly; a steep fare thins the shore but still pays. The right choice depends on whether the queue is longer than your boat.

Omens, including mist, ashfall, still water and a pale light over Cocytus, temporarily change the rules of their rivers and set you a task. Complete it and every fare pays more until the next tribute. Some passengers are worth five ordinary fares, while others arrive marked and cost you later. Both types wait apart from the queue, and skeletons will not board them for you.

Sometimes someone on the far bank wants to return to the living. Their fare is enormous, but the shore realizes your boat travels both ways and stops coming to the water for a while. Death also walks the pier with offers: a shorter crossing, a fuller shore or fifteen minutes without anything burning. She charges in crossings, not coin, and does not haggle.

Rowing and crew

Click the water to speed up a crossing, or hold the button to row at about the pace of a living rower. You can also buy skeletons to load the boat and cast off without you, leaving you free to read the ledger. The underworld continues when you close the game, but the crew stops working when nobody is watching; when you return, you are told exactly how much coin they did not earn.

Some tasks require your hands. Death may spill her purse across the deck and give you thirty seconds to gather the money. Lethe may show you faces of people you have ferried, two of each, and ask you to match their names.

Tributes and ending

Hades takes everything from a run and pays you in shadows. You can spend shadows on relics that survive the reset, so each new run starts further along than the last. At the first tribute he barely looks up from his book; by the sixth, he wants to know what a boatman could be saving up for, and he is not asking idly.

A run takes about three hours and ends with a final purchase, a last crossing, one more thing Death has to say and the credits. You can play again to return to the rivers. The game has no ads, microtransactions, energy bar or timer you can pay to skip, and needs no account, server or internet connection. There is a final purchase rather than an endless prestige loop.