Toll Booth Simulator

My first reaction when I booted this up was mild confusion, and that feeling stuck around for longer than expected, which is actually the game's biggest selling point. The premise drops you in the desert with a freshly minted debt of $999,999 after a failed prison escape, and your assigned punishment is running a lonely toll booth on a stretch of highway that sees a surprisingly eccentric parade of travelers. You check passports, collect payment, decide who gets waved through and who gets turned away. For the opening stretch, the passport-checking rhythm has a low-key Papers, Please quality to it, with government security restrictions shifting day to day and keeping you honest at the gate. It clicks. The problem is that SifDev, a genuinely ambitious one-person studio from Azerbaijan, seems to have decided that running a toll booth was not interesting enough on its own, and honestly, they were probably right. The game's real income engine is farming and mocktail production. You plant exotic fruit seeds in pots inside your RV, water them manually, harvest them, and mix the results into sellable mocktails with effects that range from strange to alarming. Later you can expand to a large farm plot across the desert, though the farming loop has no automation whatsoever - no sprinklers, no hired farmhands, just you and a watering can. That design choice creates a real time-sink tension that some players will find meditative and others will find exhausting. On top of the farming, hired workers can take over booth duty after roughly three hours of play, which means the game named Toll Booth Simulator will eventually stop requiring you to work the toll booth at all. That irony is either charming or a warning sign depending on your tolerance for genre drift. Rounding out the income streams: a trash-selling alien who parks near your RV, a separate alien crash site that rewards you with mocktails if you deliver unruly drivers to a tractor beam pad, house-robbing runs across the open map, and a police chase system that fines you if they catch up. There is also a dating app, pet adoption, purchasable houses you can furnish, and a car shop. It is a lot, stacked on top of each other without much connective tissue. From a systems perspective, what is here is functional but shallow by the standards of management-sim depth I tend to look for. The progression is purely financial - earn more, spend more, unlock slightly faster versions of the same activities. There is no meaningful branching in how you build your operation, no competing factions to manage at the gate, no reputation system that changes who shows up. The admission rules at the booth do escalate with new government directives, which is a nice touch, but the game does not build on that tension the way a dedicated document-checking sim would. Reviewers and Steam players alike have flagged that the loop feels repetitive once the novelty burns off, and recent Steam reviews have trended more mixed than the overall score suggests, indicating the honeymoon period is short. The solo dev is actively patching, with quality-of-life fixes shipping at a rapid pace post-launch, which is genuinely encouraging for anyone who buys in early and wants to see the thing mature. Visually the game sits in roughly the same neighbourhood as Schedule 1 - simple low-poly models, basic animations, a functional open map with hills and desert scrub. It runs smoothly at 60 FPS with minimal technical issues aside from goofy ragdoll physics on knocked-out drivers and slightly long initial load times. The audio is country-flavored and unobtrusive. None of this will win awards, but it is stable and readable, which matters more than polish at this price tier. If you are the kind of player who wants a tight, well-authored management experience with meaningful late-game decisions, this will probably frustrate you by the four-hour mark. If you want a weird, low-pressure sandbox to poke at across a few evenings, with enough variety to stay interesting for a weekend, this delivers that. The alien subplot alone is worth raising an eyebrow at.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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